


Pinesmoke

by brigantines



Category: Finisterre: The Nighthorses - C. J. Cherryh, Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Western, Dragon Horses, Dragonrider AU, Elemental Magic, F/F, F/M, Kelpies, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mating Flight, Multi, Polydins, Psychic Bond, Telepathic Sex, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 00:58:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8349907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigantines/pseuds/brigantines
Summary: One year ago, senior rider Shirogane Takashi and his nighthorse Moon vanished in the High Wild during a rescue mission to the isolated mountain village of Kerberos.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A Voltron/Finisterre crossover, because Pern wasn't the only sci-fi series featuring telepathic alien animal sidekicks that threw their riders into bed together. Everybody is 18+ and the Holt siblings are twins.

***

The rangers arrived three hours before last bell, pounding up to the gates on lathered nighthorses that still somehow had the energy to curvet in place and snap at each other, trembling and angry with their riders’ anxiety. The riders themselves were pale-faced and haunted, dark leathers dusty from the long road in, and their hands worked the reins constantly, trying to hold the barely checked violence in their horses. 

They spoke to no one but the gate warden and wheeled away as soon as their errand was finished, but it was already too late. A pair of unbonded nighthorses, in the curious, hostile way of their kind, had slunk near enough to skim images off the emotion-rich, bubbling surfaces of the rangers’ minds and then carried the news on into the ambient, sending it racing along the walls and through corridors in whispers and mental pictures, ripples from a single splash growing ever larger in a pond. 

Within scant seconds almost everyone in or near Galaxy Garrison outpost #19, Shamesey port camp, knew something had happened. Within minutes, everyone knew it was something bad. The operators at the perimeter turrets and the watchtowers glanced at each other nervously and checked their instruments; the riders stationed at the edges of the pasture fences shifted in their saddles and threw looks at the winding, dusty roads tracking through the grass.

Normally the winds here blew in from the sea, bringing familiar scents of salt and rotting fish from Shameseytown harbor, or whiffs of exhaust and jet fuel from the offshore spaceport jutting up from the waves. Not today. Today the wind was in the west, and one could catch just the faintest hint of snowy pine forest and smoke coming from the jagged, ominous mountains rising in the far distance.

There’d been an accident, the rumors said. A mountain convoy had wrecked, or been ambushed, or massacred wholesale; the tale was different in each telling. Humans injured or dead on the rocks, among the high pines. Nighthorses injured or dead, stampeded in a panic. Something had spooked them badly, had terrified a whole convoy of hardened, veteran rig drivers and guards and their rider escorts. Something bad, really bad, up in the mountains.

And an image passed mind to mind like contagion: a sleek alien battleship hanging in the sky.

“Castillo!” an older cadet yelled as Lance swarmed up a steel paddock fence like a cat up a tree, narrowly avoiding a utility vehicle speeding down the dirt path between the stock barns. The driver cursed at him as the wheels nearly clipped his bootheels. “Castillo, did you hear anything? Is it an attack?”

As if Lance would know, just because he _sometimes_ didn’t turn on his psi-dampeners and _sometimes_ pulled gossip from the ambient. He shook his head, pretending the word ‘attack’ didn’t make his stomach flip unpleasantly. 

“I just drive the mules, man.” The horse-camp situated at a very specific distance on the other side of the cattle pens looked stirred up as hell to him as he squinted, shading his eyes against the overhead glare, but he wouldn’t get anything more than wisps out of the ambient from this far away even if he shut his dampeners off. 

Garrison brass didn’t want horse problems interfering with their work and their personnel, so they’d ordered the rider barracks and the den lodges built beyond the outer limits of a nighthorse’s limited telepathic range. The horse-camp had expanded past those original estimates several times over thanks to the growing population of Shameseytown harbor itself, hundreds upon hundreds of unprotected minds all crowded together and sending up a constant broadcast of ‘tasty humans here, please devour’ to every native Altean predator that walked, slithered or crawled. Ghosties, lorry lies, bushdevils, willy wisps, cave fishers, river lurks, wights, hobgobs, spook bears, shadowcats, ghost lanterns, nightbys and mountain furies. Things without names or descriptions because no one that had seen one lived to tell the tale. The smaller vermin were attracted to garbage more than brains but they wouldn’t hesitate to snack on a corpse or an injured victim, especially in a swarm, and mid-level predators were attracted to vermin populations, and bigger predators like lorry lies and spook bears were attracted to anything without strong psychic defenses. They would actively hunt people, and they weren’t afraid of guns or fire. 

Nighthorses themselves were apex predators, omnivorous shapeshifters that were fortunately more addicted to human emotions than human flesh. They came down from the deep mountain forests and up from the stormy oceans like masses of skittish shadows, lusting after human minds, lurking around the walled towns and harbors. Their presence drove off the vermin and the spooks that would otherwise overrun every settlement on Altea, but the horses weren't content just to act as a pest control service. They wanted people, particular people with particular flavors of thought, all for their own, and they didn't take no for an answer. The only way to put off a nighthorse’s Call was to shoot it or shoot yourself, because dampeners wouldn't stop it when it got frustrated, and walls wouldn’t keep out a creature that could convince you to open the door and go wandering out into the snow. Even rabbit sized spooks could manage that, persuading victims that there was something they should investigate, or something important forgotten outside. 

A horse had a brain big enough to dreamwalk, to make you see things that weren't there. A horse could convince you of anything. 

Some of Lance's classmates (cargo pilot training, full of second and third sons and daughters that couldn’t afford better classes, the work program welfare kids like Lance) were out in front of the tack shed, holding stained rags and only barely pretending to be oiling the saddles on their sawhorses. They were all staring nervously over at the horse-camp and furtively touching their dampeners, as if to reassure themselves that the small plastic devices in their ears were still there. 

“Something's wrong with the horses,” one of them called out anxiously to Lance, seeing him on the fence like he was about to climb over it. The other cadet was a townie, with a townie’s deeply superstitious fear of everything outside of the walls, including horses and their riders. Even the driest Garrison lectures about the science of psychic projection found it hard to put a dent in the terror inspired by campfire stories about telepathic predators emptying entire settlements, luring children away in the night or convincing people that a looming cliff edge was a safe, stable path. The High Wild was a dangerous, uncivilized place, full of dangerous, uncivilized inhabitants, creatures and humans alike, and all the coastal and lowland townsfolk made sure their children knew it. The horses took people as surely as the ghosties and spooks did. Lured them out of the safety of town walls, promised them adventure and self-sufficiency and knowledge beyond what any ordinary person would ever experience. Promised them devotion and loyalty beyond what any human could offer another. Plenty of riders came from the towns, but none of them ever went back to live inside the walls where their horses weren’t allowed.

Lance wasn’t a townie. He swung over the fence carelessly, ignoring the way they all immediately looked askance at him (climbing the high fences was against regs, even though none of them were electrified anymore; certain species of vermin were attracted to high voltage electricity), and thumped down on the dirt, whistling for his girls. Two dusty, dun colored heads shot up from the press of massive bodies shoving and shouldering each other around the hay feeders.

“Nothing wrong with the horses, except that it's autumn,” he called back, trying to sound like he was sure himself. He wasn’t a rider, he wasn’t anything close to a rider, he just worked in the barns with the non-Altean stock animals and came into slightly closer proximity to the horse-camp. “The sirens haven’t gone off, right? It’s not anything unless there’s sirens.”

“There weren’t sirens last winter.”

Nobody wanted to talk about last winter. Lance kept walking out into the paddock, lifting his hands to greet Cookie and Biscuit as the huge draft mules trotted to him eagerly. Soft black muzzles thrust against his fingers and his overalls, nosing for treats. The mules were distant hybrid cousins to nighthorses with only a fraction of their telepathic ability, and they didn’t seem to have been affected by the general distress-- except for how both of them stopped pushing at him and lifted their heads to the horizon in eerie unison, gazes fixed and ears pricked. Like they could see something there that he was blind to. 

“Hey, hey, ladies,” he crooned soothingly to them, resisting the prickling urge to switch off his dampeners and see what they were seeing, feel what they were feeling, even if it was something bad. He didn’t want to do that in front of other people. “None of that, now. Come on, we gotta go to work. No sirens means no time off.”

And there were no sirens as he brought the mules in and got them harnessed; instead he could see senior riders and Garrison officers moving out in force, glaring down loiterers and gossip-mongers hanging around, ordering them back to work or on sullen punishment runs around the other side of the compound, far away from the horses. They ignored him, he was just one more work program kid in dirty grays mucking around the barns with a shovel. Garrison ran on free work program labor since they had to offer high rates (to tempt fearful townies) and hazard pay both (for anyone coming into contact with dangerous native predators), and also had the expense of unofficially sponsoring the horse-camps. Kids like Lance, who just wanted to learn how to fly in return for room and board and some menial chores, they didn’t have to pay at all, until he’d started signing up for jobs that took him closer and closer to the outside walls. 

His fingers tightened around the shovel handle. Several of the uniforms striding purposefully past him taught his classes, saw him every day in the front row taking notes on his datapad, and he bet they didn’t even know his name.

He waited until there were no more heavy footsteps nearby, parking himself in one of the empty cattle lanes behind a barn, and reached up angrily to turn off his dampeners. 

It was like having a bag over your head and not knowing it, a blindfold wrapped around your eyes suddenly being torn away. The world expanded infinitely around him in brilliant color and detail; the mules were _::anxious mules, wanting safe-stalls-barn,::_ the cows nearby were _::grass, chewing, herd-sense,::_ and there were vermin scurrying around the grain silos, imaging blades of grass as tall as trees. There was even a predatory spook out there somewhere, something with a big enough brain to image _::fences::_ and _::fat cows::_ in crisp detail; a firehawk, maybe, from the strangely tilted perspective, and Lance’s head swung unerringly to seek the dark shape perched fearlessly on an abandoned cargo-loader. Firehawks were bold and opportunistic, big enough to steal kills from solitary nighthorses, and savage when cornered. Lance couldn’t go that way with the mules, not unless he went to grab a stunner rifle first to drive the hawk off.

There were people, too, contributing nervous pictures that the animals passed on. Scowling faces and worried glances, whispers among clustered, bent heads. A convoy accident. Death on the mountain. The ambient had grown dark and heavy, full of bad feelings: fear and dread, suspicion, alarm, grief, slow boiling resentment. The further the rumors flew the more they were embellished, as nighthorses and human minds unconsciously added their own opinions and spread misinformation. 

The wave of images had already hit the edge of the horse-camp and started working back, and tempers were flaring over matters that had nothing even remotely to do with a convoy accident. Lance saw/felt a Garrison officer haul off and slap a surly cadet in a sudden fit of blind anger; a knot of junior riders broke apart into shouts and wild, swinging punches as a nighthorse filly squealed and tore a strip of hide off the shoulder of the nearest stallion. Autumn meant mating season, horsefights under the shortening daylight sliding insidiously into the sexual politics of the base. Autumn meant predators growing bold and aggressive in their need to fatten up before winter, wild horses spurred nearer to human civilizations as they followed the migrating herds, and reckless colonists desperate to move last loads of cargo before the storms locked up the mountains tight for a whole season. There were always disasters in autumn. 

A stray nighthorse bolted past him like a comet, its fierce alien mind full of _::autumn females::_ and also _::burning pines.::_ A wild, shivery lust gripped him hard enough that his stomach flipped, and in the next moment of receding hoofbeats he was breathing in thick, eye-watering smoke, his brain so convinced it was real that his lungs seized in a coughing fit. He had to put a hand out against the corrugated metal of the barn wall, leaning into it, dizzy and gasping for air.

It’s not real, he told himself, clinging stubbornly to his training. It’s not real, it’s not here, it’s not _here._

_Here_ was rough, uneven metal against his shoulder, sore muscles all up and down his back and neck, hands sweating in heavy work gloves. Blisters from mucking out stalls and hauling buckets. Tiredness, physics homework due in the morning and a quiz he hadn’t studied for. Boots needing polishing back in his room. The smell of stock animals and their waste out here by the barns, grass scents from the nearby pasturage, horses and cows and grain and mud-- he’d come all the way out to this colony to become a pilot and they’d put him to work as a stableboy-- but this was his every day, this was him safe within Garrison walls and far, far away from whatever bad shit had happened on the treacherous western mountains. He was safe here. Smoke and pines had happened to a rider, and he wasn’t one. Smoke and pines weren’t real for him.

They felt real. If he looked up, there was the fearful notion that he would see blue mountain sky and evergreens rising around him instead of wafting vapor trails from the spaceport and the towering metal arch of the mass driver built out in the sea, its glittering apex climbing towards the clouds. 

Cookie and Biscuit spooked immediately as Lance’s mind hit the ambient, carrying all of its complicated anxieties that made no sense to nighthorses or mules. They snorted and tossed their heads, nearly yanking him off his feet. 

He tried to calm them in Spanish, distracted, jerking the leads just under their chins to get their attention back on him instead of _::burning pines::,_ but they weren’t interested in listening. The whites of their eyes showed as they crowded into each other, tangling their harness straps, dinner plate sized hooves stomping the loose dirt fretfully. The heavily laden grav sled they were hauling began to tip to the side alarmingly.

“Shh, shh,” Lance placated, futilely shoving at a brawny mule shoulder in an attempt to move them over. He might as well have been pushing a brick wall. “Oh come on, I spent the last two days shoveling that, don’t dump it on the road--”

Yeah, he was right on track to become a fighter pilot. Everybody knew all the greats started out as mule drovers. He yanked his gloves off, trying to keep a lid on his frustrations when the air already felt thick and tense, and carefully began untangling bits of harness. No real alarm had sounded for the Garrison forces to scramble and the senior combat riders to muster, but he knew it was better to get his work done and get behind locking doors quickly with this kind of atmosphere. Hunk was probably back in their shared room already, fretting; he was a townie from one of the island chain settlements down south where they didn’t have the kind of flat pasture land for big horse-camps. Strong feelings in the ambient amplified by lots of horses made him queasy and anxious. 

Hunk wasn’t the only one. Maybe their instructors would forget about any homework being due the next morning. Garrison staff-- whether they were cadets or officers, janitors or cafeteria workers-- that ended up as riders were quickly dismissed from ordinary duties and recategorized as irregulars, but there was enough practical overlap between the two groups that horse problems almost always became Garrison problems. Nobody was going to get any sleep tonight, probably. A handful of Lance’s classes tomorrow would be canceled or half-empty, probably, but maybe they wouldn’t, so if the stupid, stubborn mules would just cooperate so he could be finished here...

An image came to him through the ambient: a skinny brown boy in ill-fitting, patched drudge grays and a faded blue bandana, struggling pathetically with a pair of mules pulling the shitwagon. 

Lance twisted around, stung, and spotted a group of local townies loitering in the mouth of a maintenance shed: two older Garrison cadets in orange and cream and a girl with motor oil streaked on her face and biceps bigger than Lance’s head. A mechanic, maybe, dressed in the same gray overalls he wore but with the top half hanging loose and the arms tied around her waist. Hers fit. Hers might’ve been tailored, or were at least in her actual size, and they were neatly tucked into good black boots that probably didn’t need rags stuffed in the toes to make them fit. That was how you could tell townies at a glance; they always had things just a shade nicer than everyone else, always looked just a little better fed. Most of them didn’t have to work for a living on top of their courses. 

Hunk, of course, being an exception, because Hunk was good people. Hunk didn’t sneer at anybody or write ‘go home’ on their doors, and he didn’t sass the riders that kept everyone here alive behind their backs. 

This trio didn’t care that he’d noticed. They weren’t getting any closer to the mules with their stomping hooves and rolling, white-rimmed eyes, but they were enjoying the show, hoping Lance would get kicked or bitten, or otherwise do something stupid for their entertainment. 

One of the boys said something behind his hand while staring right at him. Lance rolled his eyes, cheeks flushing dully as he went back to cajoling and fighting with the mules. Yeah, talk shit about him when he was by himself, when he was actually trying to _do_ something in the middle of all these bad feelings in the ambient, while they sat around and made it all worse. The lot of them would’ve scattered like small, ghostie vermin in front of a hungry nighthorse if Hunk or a Garrison officer or even a rider were here to stare them down. They were only loitering outside to gawk at the disturbed horses and the alarm running through the compound.

But you didn’t deliberately start fights around the horses. If you had to argue you went to a safe distance, out of their range, you didn’t broadcast strong emotions that would bring them like sharks to blood in the water. Everybody knew that, townies included. Even if the ambient was swirling with resentment, even if it was easy right now, too easy to think back on every nasty little comment whispered behind his back, the sidelong looks in classrooms, the tolerant condescension of the instructors-- 

His spine stiffened. 

The image now was a brown rat scurrying on the port docks. Vermin. Spacer flotsam, a migrant from Earth or some other shitty, overcrowded colony and desperate enough for work to come here to the Outer Rim, where there was always a need for extra bodies and officials didn’t care so much about things like education or proper documents. Refugees tried it all the time, the desperate or destitute stowing away on drone piloted cargo freighters and evading or bribing customs at the ports. 

Lance wasn’t a fucking stowaway. He and his sisters had come here on a passenger ship with real luggage and real passports and the full battery of immunizations; yes, looking for work, but that was what people fucking did when they moved somewhere. The Castillo family had several members in the Garrison on other planets and they’d heard through the grapevine that there was good money to be made on Altea. Settlements looking for fresh blood, jobs that needed doing. Work that wasn’t factory drudgery or mining. And unclaimed land, acres of it, just laying around for anyone to stake out and improve, without a native sentient population to infringe on. 

Altea was still classified a frontier planet with vast swathes of wild, unexplored territory in the interior, most of the established towns clinging to the dubious safety of the coastlines. The Garrison needed people. The Garrison needed fearless adventurers, needed scientists and soldiers and pilots to map and tame a gorgeous, dangerous wilderness planet. That, more than any promise of money, was what Lance had come here for. 

Townies didn’t give a shit. Most townies liked to pretend there wasn’t a whole world outside the high walls of their settlements or even anything above their small patch of sky. They were scared of the nighthorses that safeguarded their cities from the legions of smaller psychic predators, the low level spooks and ghosties that would wipe all human presence off Altea entirely within weeks if the horses weren’t around. They were suspicious of nighthorse riders even though plenty of riders _were_ townies, or used to be, and hostile to spacers whether they were Garrison imports or regular people just looking for a new home. 

Lance had an image to send right back, spurred on by the anger and fear in the ambient: a trio of sheltered, fat mice huddled inside their precious walls, squeaking and trembling in fear whenever the wind blew too hard. 

The girl laughed out loud, confident enough to be dismissive, but the tallest cadet came out into the cattle lane with clenched fists, cheeks mottled red. Wanting a fight. Wanting _::shit-shoveler boy on the ground, crying, apologizing.::_ and meeting Lance’s insulted glare deliberately. 

_::Jeering bullies in a circle, laughing, pointing. Laughing ugly faces::_ came into the ambient, a stray image from somewhere. It wasn’t Lance’s but he’d been that kid, he remembered how it felt. His hands pulled into fists, making his blisters sting, and one of the mules snapped dangerously at thin air near his shoulder. 

And then, _::shit-shoveler boy wearing a bandana like a rider. Horse-fucker. Fondling the mules, pretending they were nighthorses. Spreading his legs for riders and their horses.::_

“That the best you’ve got?” Lance snapped, mouth running faster than his brain. Now it was both of them wanting _::fight.::_ “Good clarity though, lots of detail. You spend a lot of time staring at horse dicks, townie?”

“The bell’s gonna ring,” the cadet sneered, moving into the more comfortable realm of verbal insults. “You’re gonna be lonely tonight, horse-fucker, there’s a dead rider out there right now, maybe a dozen, and good fucking riddance. Maybe they all went prancing happily off a cliff edge right in front of them like that dumb spacer Shirogane last year--” 

A riot of pictures flew suddenly in the ambient. _::A broad shouldered young man in rider leathers. Short hair, kind-patient-handsome smile. A nighthorse stallion with surprisingly delicate lines, a fine-boned head and long, flowing forelock obscuring one eye. A vain, friendly nighthorse calling itself Moon.::_

_::Disgusting horse-fucker spacerat boy consorting with animals in the dark.::_

_::Moon and Shiro in the arena, showing juniors how to tack up. Moon and Shiro standing quietly together. Moon and Shiro going out the gates, out into the wild::_

_::Shirogane’s funeral, people pretending to be sad, empty grave without mourners. Dead vermin.::_

The hurt-angry stormburst of images cut off abruptly because the cadet was on his ass in the dirt, and Lance’s fist was throbbing where he’d smashed it into the older boy’s sneering mouth. He could hardly see for the red haze in his mind, flickers of images from the spectators guiding him as he grabbed a handful of uniform and yelled in the other boy’s face to _take that back, take that back you townie piece of shit._ The ambient was full of angry faces, bared teeth, older hatreds bleeding in. His sisters would belt him for fighting-- no, _Lance’s_ sisters would yell but they would never raise a hand to him, it was someone else he was seeing with a strap doubled up in their hand, hitting flesh, the recipient whimpering at each stroke, humiliated and furious and afraid. He saw himself, _::skinny boy screaming nonsense in another language, skinny boy sitting on top of a bigger, stronger boy.::_

 _::Skinny boy rolled to the ground by stronger boy, hair pulling, clothes ripping, punches raining down. Dull thump of knuckles impacting flesh. Skinny boy bleeding.::_ Lance clawed and struggled, gulped for air that tasted like smoke, his entire front a maze of pain, weight crushing his ribs-- the cadet straddling him, snarling and wild, pushed too far by the chaos in the ambient. 

_Don’t ever pick fights around the horses_ came back to him, a stern-faced instructor lecturing a packed hall full of wide-eyed first years. _Don’t ever give them a reason to be interested in your blood._

A nighthorse was drifting closer to them, attracted by high emotions. His head snapped to the side from a blow, Lance saw its tripartite hooves picking their way slowly across the cattle lane towards them. Stalking them.

The townie didn’t see, the townie was too caught up in his own head and still trying to knock Lance’s teeth out, even though the mechanic girl and her friend were calling for him to stop, to come back, to get out of the goddamn street. Lance flailed at him uselessly, grabbing a meaty forearm as a hand clamped around the lower half of his face. The townie thought _::bite::_ just as Lance briefly considered it, white human teeth sinking down into flesh, red blood running. 

The nighthorse crooned approval, followed by a series of sharp clicking sounds that didn’t belong in any mammalian throat. Lance had spent enough time sharing the surf with marine predators to recognize _that._ Coastal horses, saltie horses, were born from the ocean, coming up from the stormy waters without well-defined ideas of what constituted prey and not-prey on land. Their first instinct with everything was to get their teeth on it. 

“Get _off,_ you dick--” he yelled into the townie’s palm, muffled and useless. “There’s a horse--” _::HORSE::_ he imaged violently instead, making his opponent jerk back. The mechanic girl’s voice had gone high and shrill in fear, yelling for them to run, and the townie was listening now. He sucked in a breath like Lance had actually punched him and scrambled off and away, broadcasting mindless white panic as he launched himself for the safety of the shed. His fellows slammed the door behind them while Lance was still struggling off the ground, as if a wooden door and thin metal walls would afford any protection from _telepathy._

He got his feet under him, gasping, limping towards the mules, or at least where he thought the mules were, listening for the jingling harness. His shovel was still on the grav sled-- a pathetic weapon against a nighthorse, but better than bare hands. Images from the ambient flooded in, making his vision tunnel and dim. 

_::Broken pine trees, furrows in the ground. Nighthorses panicking. Convoy trucks sliding on the road, wheels spraying gravel.::_

His hands found a warm, muscular shoulder, stiff roached mane, leather harness and buckles. He was lucky the mules hadn’t bolted already, he was lucky they were stubborn and ornery. They were imaging _::nighthorse, hunting nighthorse, slinky toothy nighthorse,::_ mixing that into the ambient. 

_::Mountain roads, hunting nighthorse.::_

The nighthorse was near enough now that Lance could see the places where soft midnight hide gave way to tiny glittering scales on its muzzle, cat-stepping silently on the soft dirt, its jaws hanging open in the awful, gaping grin of its kind. The mules pinned their ears back and stamped in warning, each of them outweighing the nighthorse by at least a thousand pounds, but the horse ignored them. It wanted the pictures in his head, it wanted _::human boy fighting in the street, human boy bleeding.::_ Its long, tapering tongue flickered out, more reptile than mammal. Scenting him. He pressed himself back against the sled uselessly. All the lectures he’d ever had on horse behavior-- think of calm images, do not run, put obstacles between you and the animal, signal a rider, _do not run_ \-- went scattering out of reach, fear closing like deep water over his head as sense-memories swirled faster and faster in the ambient, overwhelming. 

He was in the mountains, he was in the pine forest, the air was cool on his skin as he breathed in lungfuls of smoke. He was looking at-- a clearing, trees snapped off at the trunk like something huge had smashed down into them. 

_::Deep furrows plowed into the ground. Burning pine trees. Twisted metal. Upset humans.::_

Nighthorses didn’t care about names, nighthorses didn’t care about details. They didn’t care whether the images they circulated were even true or relevant. Humans had the deadly imaginations, their minds adding fantasies and delusions and emotional overtones that could make untrue things real for the horses. Lance couldn’t know what was true and what wasn’t in what he was seeing.

And then, then: 

_::A broad-shouldered young man in rider leathers. A ruined town gate, half hanging off its hinges, no nameplate but in broad painted white strokes across the weathered wood - Kerberos.::_

Lance inhaled sharply, coming back to himself in a plunging rush. The nighthorse’s mad, red eye was directly in front of his own, lean head twisted and cocked like a bird’s to watch him.

This was too much for the mules. Cookie squealed in outrage and reared up in her traces, striking out with a massive, steel-shod hoof; the nighthorse eeled away gracefully and then spooked off at a gallop as the grav sled tilted too far to the side, dumping half its cargo of carefully piled cow manure all over the lane. 

Lance’s ass hit the ground, too, his legs suddenly trembling too much to hold him up, quick desperate breaths rattling in and out of his aching chest. 

Kerberos. Somebody out there was thinking about the Kerberos massacre, and linking it to this incident. Somebody was thinking about Takashi Shirogane, missing now for over a year and presumed dead, the go-to example used in training courses about _human error_ and the tiny, fatal mistakes even an experienced rider could make out in the High Wild, and somebody was thinking about alien ships. 

Altea was an uninhabited planet. There were great ruins indicating some former civilization, maybe even an advanced spacefaring one, but no sign of intelligent native life had ever been discovered save for the nighthorses themselves. But there _were_ raiders, sleek alien snubfighters that dropped down into the atmosphere and occasionally skirmished with Garrison forces. Nobody knew exactly what they wanted. Their ships refused all communications and opened fire on anything that didn’t flee immediately, and some even eagerly pursued human forces in apparent hopes of combat. They didn’t seem to have a ground presence, or a fleet, or even a space station near Altea that would explain their being here, but the stories popped up year after year. 

Tinhat rumors said they were looking for something. Tinhat rumors said they took people, sometimes, but the Garrison had always officially denied that. There were plenty of ways to die or disappear on Altea without alien abduction being added in. 

Pidge was going to hit the roof when Lance told him what he’d seen.

He pulled himself slowly and shakily to his feet, leaning on the barn wall. Cookie and Biscuit were calmer now that the nighthorse had gone and had stopped shoving at each other, though the damage had already been done with their spilled cargo that he’d have to re-shovel. He didn’t care. He didn’t even care about the blood all down the front of his grays and one eye swelling shut, that he’d lost his temper and lost a fight to a townie. His thoughts ran in rabbit-circles, chasing each other. Kerberos, Shiro, aliens. Something in the mountains, just like Pidge’s crazy stories about government cover-ups. Something crashing in the mountains. 

He needed to calm down. He counted slow breaths until his heart stopped pounding so hard and thought hard about nothing, picturing _::quiet water::_ and _::pebbles under clear, still water::_ the way a rider would to quiet his horse. The cattle lane stayed blessedly empty; the saltie wasn’t coming back. The saltie had probably gone down to the water at the horse-camp’s long stretch of private beach.

Three senior riders in full combat rigs whipped past him as he was pulling the heavy shovel down from the sled, resigned to his fate. They were headed out to the abbreviated runways behind the Garrison compound where a single seat patrol craft was just now rising into the air, wash from its engines blurring the landscape around it. 

The nighthorses galloped at breakneck pace towards the sudden, sheer drop of the man-made takeoff ridge, riders bent down close to sleek necks already beginning to look long and serpentine as the change began. They threw themselves off the edge in a staggered triangle formation and finished the transformation in open air: great leathery wings beat the air and draconic bodies three times their original size lifted away, the humans on their backs suddenly much smaller specks clinging to their harnesses. Lance watched them go, clutching his shovel, torn between lingering terror over the aggressive horse he’d had up in his face and the helpless, half-scared _wanting_ that always stirred up when he saw beating wings. 

Being Called by a nighthorse was an overnight launch to the top of the food chain, a field promotion that would otherwise take years of scraping and ass-kissing and maybe a little actual cock-sucking, buttering up all the right people. Lance’s own efforts (plus the sterling reputations of the elder Castillo sisters) had gotten him into Garrison’s cargo hauling track. A couple more years of shoveling shit and pounding in fence posts and scrubbing tack (and losing fights with townies), he might get taken on one of the truck convoys. A couple more years after _that_ he might get the chance to fly a wallowing, tub of a freighter, ferrying supplies, and if he hadn’t died of boredom or old age by then he might someday get to do shuttle runs up to the orbital ring. 

The way things were going now, he would never get to touch a real starfighter. His sim scores weren’t high enough to guarantee him a spot in the coveted fighter pilot courses, and all his enthusiastic volunteer work and hounding of officers had gotten him was a vague promise about being kept on the waiting list, which his oldest sister Martina had told him kindly was more of a euphemism. Middle sister Dani was more blunt: he could get hired on with her truck crew and guarantee himself a rig of his own one day, or he could tie himself to a horse’s tail and pray for a miracle and a field promotion.

She’d said it grimly, like he was a fool to hope, like it was set in stone that he’d get hurt. Riders did get hurt, riders drew hazard pay from their very first day thanks to the dangers of being anywhere near the horses. But plenty of them made their fortunes in their first year even if they were the greenest juniors ever to scramble on a horse’s back, and had to spend their first month trotting circles in the arena, getting yelled at to keep their heels down and get their goddamn hands off the saddle horn. 

Riders and their horses made human habitation on Altea possible. Riders did guard duty, exploration, escorted convoys and maintenance crews, flew alongside shuttles and recon ships, accompanied infantry and fought off raiders. They helped scout, build, and guard new settlements. Survey roads. Repair bridges and trail markers, and fill in blanks on the maps. They brought medicine and supplies to places that even the smallest, most nimble patrol ship couldn’t reach. If they were already pilots they became aces, drinking in the instinctive knowledge of the flight type horses, and every junior rider with an interest had a guaranteed spot in the fighter pilot classes. Riders had their pick of postings. They were clannish and dangerous and strange, sometimes, just like their beasts, but they couldn’t help that. They belonged to their horses in a way that Lance had never belonged to anything.

More than that, they were heroes. They saved lives, they brought law and order to the most remote settlements. One of them, a perfect stranger with no reason to care (a broad shouldered young man in rider leathers, with a horse named Moon), had even pulled a gangly, defensive, fresh off the shuttle teenager out a brewing dock fight, and then waved aside that teenager’s stuttered thank-yous. He’d smiled and tipped his hat like Lance was someone that people tipped their hats to. He’d said he’d just done what was right.

Takashi Shirogane had been a hero. He’d been part of a three-man patrol group riding circuit when they’d received a distress beacon from Kerberos, a tiny, isolated settlement high in the western mountains. It was out of their way and they could have passed the duty off, could have delayed or argued jurisdiction, but they’d gone immediately to investigate in the hopes of preserving human life. 

When no further communication arrived, another expedition was sent over a week later, delayed by bad weather, and found the entire town completely deserted. Gates hanging open, houses empty, signs of a desperate battle in the streets. Bloody, discarded weapons and a few scattered bones, the dismal remnants left behind after waves of scavengers had been through. Nearly forty people missing, including the patrol and their horses. All three riders were from the Garrison originally, two of them veterans of expeditions in the high country. Shiro had been known as an ace pilot and a notorious cool head under pressure even before he’d been Called. 

The official story was that spooks had somehow gotten in the gates and wiped out the entire village. That Shiro and his partners had ridden straight into it, had been caught up before they could send out a warning of their own. Swarmed over by villagers driven insane by the ghosties. Maybe ambushed in the night, maybe attacked by wild horses or some other territorial predator. Or worse, attacked by a rogue: a horse or a spook bear that had been injured or suffered a brain fever and slipped into madness, spreading death and delusion everywhere it wandered. There were campfire stories like that about the High Wild, told at night to scare junior riders and cadets alike.

The Kerberos massacre was a tragic story. A familiar story. And once upon a time Lance might have believed it. He shoveled as fast as he could, gut churning with awful suspicions he’d only ever heard before as crazy conspiracy theories from his crazy conspiracy theorist teammate Pidge. He’d gone to the Garrison funeral with its empty caskets, names engraved in the memorial wall and folded flags sent back to any family left on other worlds. Most of the funerals here didn’t have bodies to bury. Most freighters and convoys wouldn’t carry corpses anyway, afraid of what the smell of death might attract. 

“Hey, kid! You with the mules!” 

_Now_ there was an officer around. Resentment flared, but Lance shut that down hard before the mules could carry it into the ambient. He’d learned his lesson. 

A Garrison lieutenant was heading over to him purposefully, a half-shifted nighthorse sporting scales and incongruously feathery wings and a harried rider trailing in her wake at a deliberate non-eavesdropping distance. She put her hands on her hips as he saluted, her mouth souring as she catalogued the blood on his clothes, the darkening bruises, the ginger way he was moving. She could report him for fighting if she wanted. She could get him on garbage duty for a week, which was even worse than shitwagon detail. 

“You made this mess?” she demanded instead, looking at the cowshit all over the road. “Mules spook on you and tip the sled?”

He nodded without offering anything like his usual barrage of defensive explanations, meek under a sudden onslaught of angry sister flashbacks. Marti and Dani would’ve come down on him like a ton of bricks for all this. Getting into a fight, getting up close and personal with a saltie. For a brief second he saw himself through the lieutenant’s eyes: _::scared child, alone, beaten, horse-bait.::_

“I’m eighteen and I can handle myself,” he snapped out before he could help himself, and she narrowed her eyes as he winced. Riders could do that, could skip half a conversation and respond directly to the pictures their horses threw into the ambient and get away with it, but Garrison staff couldn’t. Garrison staff were supposed to use their dampeners, and cadets didn’t talk back. He deserved garbage duty for that, and for the outright lie; he’d had a saltie in perfect position to bite his face off not fifteen minutes ago. 

“--uh. Sir.”

“Something wrong with your dampeners, cadet?” she asked dangerously, and his stomach plummeted. 

“No sir,” he mumbled, picturing Hunk’s grumbling at coming back into their shared room reeking of garbage so strongly no shower or laundry session would tame the stench. “Might need a recharge, I guess.”

“And you weren’t out here fighting?”

“No fighting around the horses, sir. One of the mules, uh, knocked into me, knocked me down.” Another lie so obvious she didn’t need the ambient to see through it. 

But the feather-winged nighthorse behind her bugled impatiently with a strange brassy note, more dragon now than equine, its lengthening tail whipping like an agitated cat’s. Lance couldn’t help a twitch at the noise; the woman didn’t glance back. 

“Leave the cleanup for the next shift,” she ordered, choosing to be merciful or simply finished wasting her time on him. “You get these mules out of the road right now and yourself back inside for a fresh set of dampeners, is that understood? This isn’t a circus for everyone to stand around and gawk at and then get themselves horse-mauled.” 

She’d obviously had experience with the ambient. Her mind was imaging a constant litany of _::stormy seas, whitecapped waves, ocean spray flying up from the rocks::_ to distract the mules. Not calming pictures, but nothing that had anything to do with the accident in the mountains, or the rumored alien ship, or Kerberos. 

“Yessir,” he managed, ducking his head, and shut his eyes to image _::quiet water::_ at the mules, missing the officer’s startled look that he knew that trick. It was a rider trick, one of the first things they taught juniors. 

Cookie and Biscuit had obediently taken up the thread of an angry, storm tossed ocean and quite forgotten about burning pine trees and mountains. Lance sent them a series of calming, soothing pictures. _::Pebbles under quiet water, peaceful shoreline.::_

“Good.” The lieutenant slapped Biscuit on the flank, startling her into a trot. The grav sled jerked into motion. “And stay away from the camp tonight, you little idiot. You like how the air feels right now? The last thing we need is a bunch of worked up horses sparking off a panic.” 

“Yessir!” he yelled back in her general direction, trotting himself to keep up with the mules’ unusually speedy pace. All around him the gossip fires were being stamped down, nighthorses chased back out to pasture and idle hands ordered to work. The Garrison base being brought slowly back under control, even if the emotions in the adjacent horse-camp were still high and wild. Shameseytown itself was at a far enough distance that the citizens might not get the full brunt of the stormy disturbance in the ambient, but there’d be horses in the water and ranging along the beaches to carry it. There’d be bad dreams tonight and formal complaints in the morning. Rich, influential townies preferred not to deal with anything they considered rider problems. Rich, influential townies preferred when the Garrison swept rider problems under the rug.

He dumped the sled and unharnessed the mules, dutifully imaging _::quiet water::_ and _::good mules, happy mules with relaxed ears eating grain::_ in their stalls to keep them calm, but churning inside of him like the lieutenant’s stormy ocean was another set of images. Shiro, and the Kerberos town gate yawning open like a waiting tomb, and memories of the great iron camp bell tolling out its mournful news. Riders dead. Riders dead in the line of duty.

Or were they?

*


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A tiny Halloween update! I'll try to do weekly updates for this story, but we'll see how it goes. *Eventually* the warning (and pairing) tags will apply.

***

They’d dragged Moon away from him with nets-- Shiro remembered that clearly, amidst the tangled wreckage they’d otherwise left of his memories. They’d gotten ropes and chains around Moon’s thrashing neck and his legs and wings that he couldn’t bite through, though he’d tried, sparks shearing off his fangs, wild-eyed and shrieking. Shifted, Moon was near the size of a snubfighter and perfectly capable of slaughtering a crowd on his own with teeth and talons, but the Others-- the Galra, he reminded himself sternly, they had a name, they weren’t monsters out of rural superstition-- knew how to handle shifted nighthorses. They’d hit Moon with some kind of electric stunners, paralyzing both beast and rider as pain came ricocheting down through the mental link between them, and then gone straight for the wings, tangling them in nets and binding them fast to Moon’s heaving sides.

He didn’t remember much after that. Flashes, mostly. Bursts of pain, of his hands clenched into claws and wet, dripping red. He’d killed a few of them himself, he thought, he’d been so deeply caught in Moon’s berserker fury that he didn’t know which of them was doing the killing. He remembered hot blood spattering his face. He remembered bones cracking. They’d flung away his rifle and his revolvers, and his knives broke on their armor, until he was down to teeth and bare hands and the raw, red fury of his horse spurring him on. The ambient had been full of _::rage::_ and _::tearing, rending.::_ The ambient had shown him _::Matt, bleeding, firing the pulse rifle, charging enemies exploding into red mist::_ and _::grabbing hands, awful clawing grabbing hands pulling Matt away::_ while Matt’s nighthorse Willow, delicate, graceful Willow, roared savagely and tore apart anything that came within reach of her claws. 

Drift, Commander Holt’s beast, was the biggest, oldest nighthorse in their trio and the Galra had gone for him first. Drift had single-handedly destroyed one of the Galra assault vehicles before they managed to get the nets on him, Holt refusing to fall back to a more defensible position and abandon the villagers screaming in the steel and wood bellies of the prisoner transports. Shiro knew-- Shiro knew he’d done it deliberately, so that Shiro wouldn’t, so that Shiro would stay with Matt. Willow and Moon were a mated pair. They wouldn’t separate unless Shiro tried to order Moon away.

It didn’t matter in the end. They were taken, slapped in restraints, carted on antigrav sleds like cargo, and Shiro only had the vaguest impressions of _::black earth, black ice, black stone, heavy cold earth::_ surrounding them on all sides. Tunnels or caves. 

He drifted in and out of consciousness, distantly aware of his fingers trailing limply against the hard-packed, frozen dirt. Sometimes there were harsh, growling voices around him, and things in the ambient he didn’t want to see, and sometimes a silence so oppressive it terrified him. Cloaked figures wearing nightmarish masks stalked up and down the lines of the prisoner convoy, peering in at particular faces; he heard Matt and Sam and someone else arguing low and fierce above his head, once, even though that wasn’t like Matt. He wasn’t half the arguer his twin sister was. Shiro wondered vaguely where Willow was, she didn’t let anyone bully her rider, but his head hurt too much to concentrate on the thought. 

He heard someone crying faintly during one of the silent times, and hoped to god it wasn’t him.

“Shiro.”

Gentle hands touching his face, wiping something cool and wet over his brow. Shiro groaned, ribs protesting with every breath. There was a sense of something _missing,_ something raw and malformed in his head that he didn’t understand, and he couldn’t sense Moon.

“Shiro, please wake up.” Matt’s voice, sounding scared. “Open your eyes.”

Where was Moon? Where was--

“Takashi, _please._ ”

“Matt.” He responded instinctively to that note of pleading in his bondmate’s voice, fear pushing him up to full awareness. Matt’s face was pale in the poor light, hovering above him; they were still underground. His head hurt unbelievably. Bodies huddled all around them, featureless lumps pressing together for warmth under blankets and jackets. The vehicle transports of the Galra were unforgiving silhouettes a short distance away.

One of the armored guards was bending down over them both, its clawed hand fisted in Matt’s hair. There was a metal collar around his neck. 

“No, no!” Matt pressed a firm hand against his chest when Shiro would have jerked upright. “It’s okay, I’m okay. Just stay still.” He twisted against the grip in his hair, vehement as he spoke to the alien. “He’s awake, see? He’s fine, he’s going to be _fine._ ”

The guard made a noise that might have been a snort, but it let go of Matt’s hair and sullenly tossed down a bag of something to the ground that Matt scrambled for, clutching it protectively to his chest. Supplies, maybe, food or water. The guard started to reach for Matt’s face again, only to stop at Shiro’s hand clamping down on its forearm, a bubbling growl rising out of his throat. 

“Shiro, don’t--!”

The cold ring of a rifle barrel inserted itself against his temple. Shiro glared sidelong up the length of the barrel at a second guard. Moon’s protective fury was still hot in his veins, outraged over anything threatening his bondmate. Moon would have killed them all. Shiro wanted to kill them all. His head felt tight and too-small, unable to process why he wasn’t already linked with Moon, feeling the change ripple through their bond as hooves became ripping talons and soft hide became hard, armored scale. His heart pounded furiously.

The guard with the rifle spoke to its companion in a rapid string of harsh noises. Matt seemed frozen in place, breath coming shallow and too quick like a prey animal’s. He wasn’t trained for this, he’d come from a civilian background before Willow flounced her way into his life and he’d never been in a fight without three angry nighthorses backing him. It was Shiro’s job to protect him. It was Shiro’s job to make sure that he and his father survived whatever happened out in the Wild--

The rifle barrel dropped away. Shiro took a cautious breath. Both guards were looking at him, at the black leathers and bandolier marking him out as a rider, but that was apparently it for the stand-off; the rifle guard shouldered its weapon in a suprisingly familiar human gesture and turned away, back to its own business. The second guard followed reluctantly, glancing back to them once or twice. Shiro had the sinking feeling he’d just made a reputation for himself, or for Matt.

Matt’s fingers dug painfully into his arm.

“What were you thinking?” he hissed, and Shiro realized he was trembling with fury as much as fear. It wasn’t in the ambient. There was no ambient, or nearly none; nothing but a queasy gray not-there feeling like what you got when a horse was sick or drugged or dreaming. There was only blank silence in Shiro's mind where he would've expected an angry bondmate.

“You can’t just-- no, _lay down._ You were _shot,_ Shiro, do you remember?”

Shiro didn’t. With the ebb of adrenaline he was starting to feel disconnected and woozy, pain announcing itself in a raw march across his body. He didn’t remember anything about the end of the battle in the village except a sense of impact and strange pressure, darkness tunneling into his human vision until he'd been relying wholly on Moon’s rage-frenzied senses to see his enemies, until his knees buckled under him traitorously. 

He braced himself with a dry-swallow. “How bad is it.”

“You’ll live, if you don't pick any more fights.” Matt pressed something to his lips. Sallowroot out of their trail kits, for pain and reducing fevers. “Chew.”

He chewed, meekly obedient, while Matt took his hand and grimly guided Shiro’s fingers to the bandages on his body: bruised ribs, a blaster hole in his side, a head wound. He’d been hauled all this way in one of the transport vehicles, two days unconscious. The convoy traveled in shifts that seemed to coincide with how often the vehicles needed to be recharged, and the prisoners were ordered out of the transports at gunpoint during the recharge periods, to walk or stretch out on the ground on the rough blankets they’d been given. 

“They’ve given us some food and medical supplies,” Matt murmured softly, keeping his head down as he prodded Shiro into taking a few sips from his waterskin. None of their personal belongings had been taken, except for their weapons. “For-- for the ones that seemed like they would make it.”

“Sam?”

“Asleep behind you.”

Shiro fell silent, struggling with the question he didn’t want to ask. The ambient was so thin here, his mind locked away from Matt’s, which meant they were out of range of any nighthorses, or worse, that Drift and Willow and Moon were all--

His fingers found Matt’s and squeezed. “What do they want with us? With the villagers?”

Matt and Sam were the scientists here. They'd come to Altea to study the psychic abilities of the native creatures, backed by Garrison hopes of improving their psychic field dampening tech. Sam was a xenobiologist specializing in extreme environments, veteran of over a dozen missions to dangerous, barely explored frontier colonies, and Matt had been his research assistant ever since he was old enough to forge his dad's signature on planetary travel visas. Even dividing his time between Earth and Altea Sam Holt had been here longer than any other Garrison labcoat, and he'd been part of more than one failed attempt to communicate with the Galra raiders. 

Drift had rescued Sam’s entire expedition team from their crashed shuttle. They’d been shot down by raiders over the mountains, surrounded by hungry winter spooks that clawed at the doors and whispered into the ambient to come out, come out, come out into the bloody red snow, until a wild nighthorse stallion marched out of the blizzard imaging _::fierce nighthorse male, fierce nighthorse eating willy-wisps, fierce nighthorse defending rider.::_ Sam was infamous in the scientific community for becoming a rider, as if he’d had a choice, naysayers likening him to the stories of explorers that became so attached to a native population they vanished into it, forsaking their former society. 

The Holts were still scientists enough to get the occasional sidelong looks from other riders. They straddled the line between civilian and rider-- Shiro and Moon had been assigned to them, to keep them safe out in the Wild while they worked on Garrison contracts or collected information, none of which changed the fact that Sam knew almost as much about Altea as the horses themselves did. If anyone could figure out why they’d been set upon and captured, it would be Matt and Sam.

“They’re not native,” Matt told him quietly. “They don’t-- won’t-- speak our language. Dad and some of the villagers tried to communicate with them, but that just seemed to make them angry.” A pregnant pause. “They put collars on us. Divided up the able-bodied adults from the others.”

Slavery. Shiro felt sick. All those stories about people vanishing in the mountains, entire villages emptied. The sort of incidents dismissed by the lowland settlements as inherent risks out in the Wild. How many convoys had disappeared, their trucks found half-buried in the snow? How many expeditions vanished without a trace, how many outposts had been found abandoned, the disappearances uninvestigated, written off as accidents? 

Above him, Matt’s breath hitched, faltering. “Shiro-- the horses--”

He could hardly see, but he groped for Matt’s shoulder in the darkness, sliding up his arm until he could cup his cheek, feeling hot tears spilled over his skin. Matt’s glasses were gone, and the left side of his face was swollen and puffy under Shiro’s gentle fingers. Bruised, and badly. There was a cut across his lip. He’d been beaten, struck across the face.

Shiro drew him down carefully to the blankets, curling around him as best he could with both of their injuries, minor and major. Matt didn’t even try to resist, shivering with more than cold, burying his face against Shiro’s neck. 

With the ambient, they wouldn’t have had to speak. With the ambient they would have been in each other’s heads, able to trade images and emotions as quickly as they were felt; it was why riders worked best with each other and struggled to make themselves understood by the horseless, who twisted language into knots. Shiro didn’t have the words for this situation. Words were clumsy, flat things, easy to misunderstand and fumble. 

When Moon had begun enthusiastically courting Willow last season, there hadn’t been room for anything but honesty between their riders. Garrison didn’t like it, Garrison didn’t want reminding that there were things riders couldn’t control, things more important than orders: attractions and conflicts between horses, autumnlust and the wild instincts naturally belonging to a beast. You couldn’t court martial a horse for refusing orders to go out in a killing storm, or arrest one for ripping out the throat of a human it saw as a threat to itself or its rider. Horses bit and kicked and fought amongst themselves, drove off younglings coming into sexual maturity to form their own herds, chased after potential mates and postured at rivals and didn’t give much of a damn for the humans dragged along in their mental wake. Moon didn’t care that Willow’s rider was Shiro’s _mission,_ that they weren’t the same age or anything near the same experience, that Garrison cast an unfriendly eye on fraternization. Moon wanted _::beautiful nighthorse female with beautiful tail::_ and appreciated that Shiro was already spending so much time around _::soft hand boy with treats in coat pocket.::_ The complexities (and impossibilities) of human courtship rituals meant nothing to Moon. 

They’d waited until Matt’s birthday for the sake of Garrison sensibilities, but at that point the publicly visible act of moving together into one of the shared rooms in the rider barracks was an afterthought. They were already in each other’s minds as much as their horses were, infected by autumn lust and the playful rituals of a young, besotted stallion and mare; Moon demanding to be brushed and braided and polished daily, and stealing human food to present to Willow, and chasing each other joyfully through the air in the warm updrafts near the shore cliffs, bugling challenges and annoying the salties in the waters below by diving at them. 

Shiro had worked himself up into a frenzy trying to figure out how to keep his randy, shameless, nuisance of a horse from interfering with his working relationship with Matt (young, untried, brilliant Matt) and his _father_ (Shiro’s senior officer), but Matt had simply put his hand on top of Shiro’s one day in the mess hall, in front of Commander Holt and god and everybody else, and looked at him very seriously and calmly while Willow and Moon settled to grooming each other outside, and that was that. They were bondmates for as long as their horses would have each other. 

Matt was crying silently into his shirt, wracked by great, tearing sobs, and Shiro couldn’t feel anything in his mind except blankness. He kept reaching out to the blank space where Moon belonged, where Matt-and-Willow belonged, and finding nothing, like a man in pitch darkness fumbling blindly for an outstretched hand and missing it each time. All he found were his own hurts, his own fears, awful and isolating and impossible to say out loud in the cold air. 

“Tell me,” he said sometime later, when Matt was exhausted and cried out and limp against him. The camp around them was quiet, except for the faint, hushed noises of crying and the heavy tread of armored boots walking the perimeter. 

“They’re not dead.” The words were barely a stir of breath in his ear. Matt had to be scared, because Shiro was scared. Riders didn’t always survive losing a horse or vice versa, even if the body went on living, mechanically going through the motions. The kindest mercy for a pair was that they should go together. 

Shiro held his breath, not daring to hope.

“Escaped?”

“No. Not exactly. They-- the Galra did something-- it was like a dampening field, I’ve never felt anything like it.” 

The words sounded as though they were sticking in Matt’s throat, hurting as they were forced free. Shiro wanted to tell him that it was okay, that they didn’t have to talk about it, wanted to go back to sleep now that the sallowroot had calmed down his aches a bit and it was warm under the blanket with Matt sharing it, but that wasn’t the truth. They had to talk about it. Riders dealing with life or death on a daily basis didn’t get the luxury of comforting lies. 

It came out in short, halting words: Shiro had gone down, bleeding, Matt and his father shoved down and restrained, the horses dragged away from them entangled in nets and forced to shift down by whatever kind of stunner weapons the Galra had used. Nighthorses were strong but not strong enough to resist a dozen chains latched to heavy vehicles, pulling at them like a tractor haul. 

One of the aliens had approached them. It looked, he said, like the creature from childrens’ stories told in the mountain villages, the Greywalk: tall, cloaked, claw-fingered, wearing a horse skull as some kind of mask or armor, the weathered grey bone covered in carved symbols. The eye skittered away from the place where its face ought to have been, not wanting to look; Shiro was glad for the first time that the absence of the ambient kept the visual out of his head. 

The thing had walked up to their horses, their angry, shrieking, savage horses with bloodspatter on their hooves and muzzles, and laid fearless hands on their heads. There had been some kind of flickering violet light. And then the horses, one by one, went silent. Stopped struggling. Stood quietly under the nets, shaking their heads absently as if troubled by insects, and waited with apparent unconcern while the armored Galra soldiers, hesitating and skittish, removed their chains and restraints. The crack of a rifle discharge had gotten them moving, spooking forward but not panicked, sluggish, all three horses trotting off towards the tree line. 

Matt screamed for Willow, unable to believe what he was seeing-- a horse wouldn’t leave a rider, a horse would _never_ leave its rider short of death or madness destroying its mind-- and her ears didn’t even twitch back in his direction. She kept going. All of them kept going. 

Willow slipped into the trees as silently as she’d originally appeared, a wild high country horse vanishing like a shadow into the bush. 

And then the Greywalk had come for them. It had knelt on the bloody ground and sifted its violet-lit claws through Shiro’s hair, needles of light sinking down and into his skin, and then it had come to Matt. He confessed, tears welling up silently, that he’d passed out before it could touch him, his entire field of vision narrowing from the awful outstretched hand wreathed in purple to slitted yellow, pupiless eyes, to darkness.

When he woke up inside the prisoner transport, he knew something was wrong instantly. The world was still flat and wrong, the way it diminished without a horse near, without the ambient. There was a metallic taste in his mouth and ringing in his ears, an awful scorched smell like ozone clinging to him, as if lightning had struck nearby, and there was something wet trickling from his nose. His hands, when he put them up to his face to scrub at the tickling sensation, came away red.

He did the first thing all riders did when coming awake, when faced with danger: he tried to call for his horse.

“Willow” was a croaked whisper in the press of bodies around him, but horses didn’t listen for words. Horses responded to their true names, the collection of specific sense-images all nighthorses broadcast to self-identify. ‘Moon’ was just human shorthand for _::shining full silver-white moon in the evening autumn sky.::_

Matt couldn’t remember Willow’s name. The images, the emotions they evoked were absent, scooped clean like his head had been opened up. Whatever the masked creature had done to him, done to all of them, it had pulled things out of him and left scarred, blank places in his memory like moth-holes in a blanket. Cannibalized. Tattered. 

“I can’t remember what our room in the barracks looks like.” Matt was crying hard now, words hiccuping and blurred between sobs, tears spilling faster and faster down his cheeks while Shiro remained silent and blank with horror. “I can’t remember the day you took me up in the shuttle to the orbital ring, I know we went, I know I have pictures from the observatory deck of the sunrise, but it’s _gone,_ Takashi, they stole all of it, they took Willow out of my head-- they _took her._ ” 

The horses were gone. 

Moon was gone.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you *do* want a visual for the Greywalk, go ahead and search for images of the 'Mari Lwyd.'


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is much later than I wanted it to be, but I think everyone can agree that it's been an extremely stressful week.

***

Low tide along the Shamesytown coast. The sea purred like a kitten, exposed rock formations glistening wetly in the last hours of sunset. The dark mouths of sea-caves beckoned. The town harbor had been built where the shoreline was a softer slope down to the lapping waves, but the coast to the north was wilder, studded with rocky cliffs and hidden little coves.

Shy of the open beach, small populations of vermin lurked in the long grass and windblown scrub brush on the headlands and crept among the rocky crevices. Unmistakable three-toed hoofprints tracked through the sand, the deep impressions shallowing out as they drew closer and closer to the tide lines, and finally disappearing under the foamy wash of the waves.

There were horses in the water. 

Pidge balanced carefully on the jagged, slippery rocks, thighs and shoulders burning, hyper aware of the bottle-green water rising and falling mere inches below her feet. Her perch was a precarious crevice between two enormous boulders that nearly qualified for cliffs themselves, sheared off from headland ridge like the ocean had taken nibbling bites with every wave until the foundations collapsed. Spray kept the lower portions of the rock wet and black, treacherous. 

A half-rotted tree limb and other unidentified green-black debris had fetched up in the space below her, and also something long and white and gleaming that she was sure she didn’t want a closer look at. She wedged her foot into a nook and tested her weight on it before letting herself down slow and easy, as if she had hours to do it and daylight to burn. 

There was death in going too quick here. Great clumps of knotted weeds clung near the water line, hiding jagged spears of rock just below the swells, and the rolling waves gave the deceptive impression that she did not have very far to fall should she slip. Wet things squirmed away from her intrusion, and all about her were shallow depressions in the rock full of clear water, waiting for the unwary climber to put a hand in and startle and lose their grip. 

She didn’t startle. She’d made this climb before.

A noise behind and below her, barely audible beneath the heartbeat rhythm of the waves. An exhalation, something large blowing water. Pidge stilled, and carefully craned her neck to look back over her shoulder.

The nighthorse was nothing more than a sinuous black line in the surf, waves washing over the dark ridge of its withers. Its nostrils blew wide like a seal’s, snorting out water, and then slitted thin. Where an Earth horse would have held its head as high as possible while swimming, the nighthorse stretched its neck out so that its head was a flat line just above the surface, long and threatening like a floating crocodile. 

It would not look much like a horse under water either. The toes of the tripartite hooves would be flared wide to act as paddles, its body would be slim and streamlined, and the silken cloud of horsetail hair would hide a long, powerfully muscled tail that moved side to side in quick, propelling bursts exactly like a shark’s. The neck would be elongated and flexible, a sharp contrast to the thick crests of land horses. Salties needed flexibility and speed to catch fast-moving prey in the seas.

Water closed over the sleek black head. It could not hear her mind in the ambient, not with her dampeners, but she could hear the sharp clicking sounds it emitted underwater, echolocating for fish or other aquatic prey. The noises trailed off into a thin, descending wail that made her shiver despite herself. It was calling to others of its kind, indicating something interesting like a school of fish or a floating colony of sea ghosties. 

Or a stupid human clinging to a rock. The spacer boy in her class that loved the sea had even told her that she was crazy when she’d asked his help in selecting a marine environment for her experiment. Lots of salties, he’d said dubiously, as if he and a group of other young idiots weren’t out on the waves every day the weather allowed, surfing or paddling or doing whatever boys did. Pidge preferred trees. Trees were _peaceful,_ and if there were wild horses hidden among them at least their first curious instinct wasn’t to shove a lantern eyed head over the side of a boat or sink their teeth into some poor swimmer’s ankle and pull them down, not understanding that humans couldn’t go between land and water the way horses did.

Still, she wasn’t afraid of horses, and she’d told him so. But she hadn’t told him why. Katie Holt, daughter of renowned scientist Sam Holt, had grown up around her father and brother’s nighthorses, but Pidge Gunderson, transfer student and general nobody, had not. 

The boy hadn’t asked her about it anyway. The way he watched the riders himself with hungry, furtive eyes was explanation enough, and he was the kind of loud, reckless boy that didn’t go too deep into things with an obvious explanation. She told him she needed access to wild horses for her experiments and that meant salties and controllable environments, and that meant sea-caves, and he’d shrugged and promised to scout one for her (for him, because to the boy and the rest of the Garrison Pidge Gunderson was another boy, and Pidge was in no hurry to inform anyone differently) if Pidge would volunteer as their comms officer in sim training. 

She hadn’t asked why there was a vacancy, but he told her anyway. He told her his name and his family’s name and his entire unasked for history so that she couldn’t think of him as ‘the boy’ anymore, it was _Lance Castillo the obnoxious talkative dickhead_ and his engineer bestie Hunk, who was much quieter if more annoyingly inclined to poke at the self-made equipment she stashed in their shared room to hide it from her own roommates. 

He might have come out here with her, if she’d asked. If she’d told him what she was really doing. He could have been another pair of eyes to keep watch on the surf, like she was used to. He could have stood above her on the rock and watched her anxiously, just the way Matt used to braid his fingers together watching her climb trees. Before Drift. Before Willow. Katie used to be the brave one, before Willow. 

She could almost hear the echo of her brother fretting in her ear, _why do we have to climb the rocks down, Katie, can’t we bring the boat in through the cave mouth, you know these boulders are riddled with hiding places for vermin._

“I’m preserving the integrity of the experiment,” she answered back to thin air, annoyed at herself for doing it. Her lips were caked in salt and talking aloud brought the taste into her mouth. “A boat in the water is an unnatural element.”

_People climbing down in flooded sea caves via holes in the roof are unnatural elements._

“Your face is an unnatural element.”

The waves surged, wetting her face with salt spray. She could almost sense Matt hovering just behind her shoulder like a phantom fucking limb, like a horse was carrying his presence to her in the ambient, even though that was impossible. She didn’t have to touch her ears to know her dampeners were in-- the ones she wore were special, gigantic, climbing up her temples into her hairline, waterproof and fitted to the curve of her skull. It was like wearing a clunky pair of earmuffs glued to her scalp. They drew odd looks in her classes sometimes, but she didn’t go anywhere without them anymore. She couldn’t afford to.

Two weeks after what her mother dubbed the Accident-- as if she really believed Garrison’s bullshit, as if what happened at Kerberos could really be written off as _human error_ \-- she’d woken up in the middle of the night and slipped half-asleep from keypad to keypad, punching in the combination codes for the doors, convinced that she’d heard Matt-and-Willow or Dad-and-Drift calling in the ambient. 

Not just calling, but waiting outside. Wanting to be let in. 

Their voices had been perfectly clear in her head, and the aching loneliness, the _::wanting light, wanting warmth::_ felt so real she’d been shivering with borrowed cold, teeth clacking. They were _::cold outside, lonely::_ and wanting in, wanting _::in with her::_ and she wanted that too, so much she’d been sobbing with it, tears blurring her vision as she hunched over the security consoles.

Her mother had woken at the sound of breach alarms and run to stop her, holding her away from the last outer door in the antechamber as she clawed and struggled for it, begging, unable to understand what her mom was shouting at her until she woke up all the way and heard the perimeter motion sensors going crazy. There’d been something waiting for her outside, _::wanting in,::_ but it wasn’t her family.

After, they moved. Research outpost to the biggest coastal towns, her mom wanting higher walls and thicker doors on time-release locks and the protection of civilization instead of the protection of horses, who had not saved her husband and son and all those poor souls in Kerberos. But the nightmares didn’t stop, and the horrible breathless feeling of _::wanting::_ that came over her sometimes echoed back from the ambient.

For the first time she’d understood what it meant to be beast-haunted. Some creature out in the woods or the long grass picking away at her heart until it found a juicy sense-memory and then broadcasting it, singing a siren song tailor made for her. She understood what made those colonists in all the tragic stories open their windows in the dead of night, or venture out barefoot in the snowy woods.

Spooks flowed to grief like water. Who wouldn’t go out into the dark, hearing their brother calling? Their father? 

Some people weren’t lucky enough to be able to just move away from their memories. Val Holt grimly made plans to catch the next freighter back to Earth, calling in favors to secure a single seat on one of the long haul rotations. She’d been ready to get a temporary post on the orbital ring during the interim, but Katie told her no. Katie wasn’t like Matt, who accepted bad things with a strained smile and a obnoxiously graceful willingness to adapt. Katie got _mad._

Garrison didn’t want to investigate the incident past its bare bones. Garrison didn’t want to throw more lives away trekking up to Kerberos for evidence, claiming there couldn’t be anything left after twenty-four hours of vermin teeth. It was, they’d told her and her mother, an unfortunate accident, probably, typical in the high country. A window left open. A door left unlocked. Some villager called out beyond the walls by the imagined voices of lost loved ones. They’d never know what really caused it. The first responders had called it a “goddamn mess all over the streets.” What was the point in sending riders or convoys or shuttles to look for bodies that had probably already been gnawed to tiny bits and dragged out into the woods? There wasn’t going to be any confirmation of cause of death, or closure. If anybody had survived the initial massacre, they wouldn’t live long out in the woods alone. 

Or maybe, they’d said, looking her mother straight in the eye, a pair of civilian scientists and a fraternizing ex-officer had made a mistake out there in the wild. Maybe the village hadn’t buckled first. Maybe the riders had brought it in with them. 

He’d given them a paltry handful of public datafiles-- a sop to get them out of the office-- and showed them to the door.

Maybe that was where it would have ended, if Katie were more like her brother and less of a fuming mess in the face of rude unfairness. Except Matt was also a relentless sonofabitch when he smelled discrepancies in the data. 

The files they’d been given about weather patterns, the timeline of beacon activations, and travel records for the first responders were redacted and truncated. The single image file they’d been given, a grainy black and white thing focusing on ruined buildings and debris-strewn streets, could have been a picture of any village anywhere in the world.

Katie had asked to interview some of the first responders.

Katie had been refused.

Katie had asked again, louder.

Katie had been refused, louder.

Katie filed an official request for other copies of information from the Kerberos timeline and had been given corrupted datafiles and more redactions.

The riders gently banned her from visiting the horse-camp without dampeners after a fight broke out in her presence, her fury made tangible in the shrieking rage and rending teeth of two stallions. Their riders had known Matt and Shiro.

Katie’s mother sat her down to talk about the grieving process.

Katie had asked for raw data from the satellites in that sector only to be told that none had been operating during the timeframe, which was an outright lie based on the graphs she was able to access from her brother’s account.

Both Matt and Sam’s access to the Garrison science databases had been immediately suspended.

Katie had used Shiro’s access to pull up patterns of energy disturbances and copied all the files in his name over to her machines, hating herself for the flood of images and correspondence she was prying into. Shiro had pictures everywhere, him and Matt and the horses, Matt and Katie from a science fair years ago, Val Holt beaming over her published thesis on Altean predator migrations, Matt and a group of Garrison students mid-argument over a lunch table. Shiro’s family back on Earth. Shiro’s friends from his student days, scattered all over the galaxy by now. Photos taken from horseback, from mid-air. There were half-finished letters, reminders about birthdays and anniversaries for her entire family. She opened up a thread between Shiro and Matt about what to get Katie for Christmas, and found herself doubled over, crying so hard her stomach muscles ached. 

Katie found old patrol reports and posted an open query on the Garrison network about the well-documented increase in raider activity in the six months leading up to Kerberos.

Katie had been blacklisted on Garrison premises and data networks.

Katie had hacked her way back in and found oodles of encrypted files and deleted correspondence, and people who had written reports and then changed them. There were underground chat sites for those who knew things they couldn’t make public, and they told her she wasn’t crazy. Other fathers had gone missing. Other brothers, other friends. Villagers and riders and townies and soldiers and explorers, swallowed up by the wilderness without a trace while Garrison disavowed knowledge.

Garrison was lying. She was convinced of it. Garrison knew what happened on that mountain. Garrison knew what had happened to her family, and she would never find out if she let her mom pack her off to Earth, afraid for her life and her sanity around Altea’s native predators. 

Val Holt was staying, trying to drum up “awareness” and bribing truckers and riders with a bounty for information, and maybe poor traumatized Katie Holt couldn’t do better than sell her sob story, but Pidge Gunderson, promising recruit for the Garrison’s communications R&D department, could. Selling off the one-way ticket had put her in enough funds to create a whole new life, good enough to fool Garrison’s clunky enrollment systems, and her mom wouldn’t know she wasn’t on that freighter until it was already too late. 

She would apologize to her mom one day. She would find some way to justify risking her life on this, when her mother had always, always told her that science wasn’t about vendettas or reckless endangerment. Pidge wanted to think that this was bigger than a vendetta, bigger than her own personal grief, but here she was keeping everything a secret, sneaking off alone so she wouldn’t have to explain herself to anyone. If something happened out here, they’d never find her body. They’d never find her _research._

Clock was still ticking. Pidge went carefully but quickly down the face of the boulder, timing herself with the swells. The sound of the waves became more and more muffled as she descended into the cool damp crevasse that led down into the cave. She braced her back against the rough, pitted rock and worked her way down, squirming past outcroppings until she found the stone bridge that she’d chosen as her safety anchor, carabiners and ropes still locked in place, and unwound several of them to lock onto her harness instead. 

There was land down below her, the dark cave floor sloping up near the back and littered with fist-sized, glistening wet stones. A fall might not kill her, but the creeping tide would. Even at low tide she could hear the echo of water slapping against stone, as most of the cave stayed submerged all the time. It was a good microcosm for what she needed, wild coastal water full of wild coastal creatures that had never been spooked by the shadow of a boat or the dragging hooked lines of nets.

The small utility lantern dangling from her belt began to glow on its own as it registered the change in light. Stone walls enclosed her, and she could feel the vibrations from the waves outside. 

She’d worked herself down nearly to the bottom edge of the craggy hole when something wriggled over the back of her gloved hand and she bit back a yelp, echoing off the water below.

Pidge forced herself to hold completely still, forced herself not to recoil and lose her handhold. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t fucking scared of a small wriggly thing that lived in a rock, she was _::stormcloud angry, thunder and lightning, trees thrashing in high winds::_ underneath her dampeners, reflexively blaring the image the way she’d learned from horses. Vermin should be running in the opposite direction. Her lips curled back from her teeth.

A long time ago, Katie Holt had stayed inside the walls of her safe, academic ivory tower and shut her ears to the nighthorses outside, while her stupid, sensitive, curious twin brother had gone out in the snow to them. She’d been afraid of trading machines for living breathing bodies, programming codes for pictures shared mind to mind. She’d been afraid of tying herself up with some alien creature, no matter how scientifically fascinating her father’s horse Drift was, and so what might have been Willow-and-Katie had become Willow-and-Matt instead.

It wasn’t Willow’s fault. Willow loved Matt in the fierce, uncomplicated way that nighthorses loved anything, and she would have defended him to her last breath. Willow hadn’t stolen Matt away from her or any townie nonsense like that. Willow had _been there_ when Matt had needed rescuing, and Katie hadn’t.

So Katie Holt didn’t get to be scared of things anymore. Didn’t have to be, because Pidge Gunderson wasn’t scared of anything at all. Pidge Gunderson was a pissed off nobody, an anonymous male student without bosom friends or famous relatives, and had nothing to lose risking his life and his education cutting classes and violating curfew.

Her boots hit the rocky floor with a defiantly loud crunch. She swept the cave angrily, daring something to be out of place, but the water was calm and clear, little waving tendrils of rock-clinging animals visible along the shallow slope that led up to her tiny beach. Minnows darted along the edge of the rocks and things with large eyes and waving arms reached out hungrily. The mouth of the sea-cave against the far wall was small but impossibly bright. It would get smaller as the tide rose.

It took her only a few minutes to set up her equipment, sensors and scanners and broadcast amplifiers. The beached carcass of a sizeable devil lantern, visibly mauled by sharp teeth and crawling with scuttling things that were the Altean equivalent of crabs, let her know that horses had been in here and recently. Once high tide submerged the rocky strip of land all the things in the water would be brought to the surface by the scent of blood and there would be nothing left of the cartilaginous mass.

 _Devil lanterns travel in colonies,_ Matt whispered in her ear, as if she needed the reminder. Pidge scowled. Drift had loved the taste of devil lantern, even going so far as to fling himself directly into the middle of large colonies, rolling and thrashing clumsily in the water with several snatched in his jaws and ignoring the stinging welts they left on his hide. Willow was a daintier hunter, preferring to stand completely still until something stupid swam close enough for her to snatch it, a skill she’d doubtless learned from fishing the shallow high country rivers. Willow didn’t like swimming and she didn’t like water that came up higher than her belly. 

Moon loved to swim. Moon loved to fold his streamlined wings and throw himself into a dive that sent him down into deep water and then popped back to the surface like a cork, splashing happily. Moon had carried Matt and Shiro out into the surf to play while Katie stayed on the shore with Willow, feeding her cookies she wasn’t supposed to have and pretending to study textbooks on her portable when all she could see was her brother and his bondmate out in the water, the sun sinking red behind them.

If there were more devil lanterns in the cave they weren’t near the surface, and anyway she wasn’t a ship or a swimmer at sea to be lured by their false light. Pidge scrubbed the back of her wrist over her eyes and made final calculations for her program. Signal strength was still a problem. 

Out in the calm water floated a small platform, tethered to one of the sturdier rocks at the back of the cave. She’d built it with pieces cannibalized from a surfboard and strapped her homebrew equipment aboard: scanning and broadcasting devices, all moderately illegal under Garrison regs given the propensity for ghosties and spooks to swarm towards radio signals. In the water, where creatures had evolved more traditionally to favor sonar, smell, and vibration-sensing organs, she had a higher chance of singling out larger predators with bigger brains with her broadcasts. In the water, she had the highest chance of encountering wild horses.

October and November were the months for salties. Every year in the fall they washed up on the beaches like a particularly seasonal sort of driftwood, streaming waterweeds and nervy aggression. Their first steps sank deep into the wet, tidal sand as they relearned how to carry their own weight outside the ocean’s cradle.

They remembered how to run almost immediately. Salties would chase anything that moved.

Her platform swirled and bobbed gently. It was hard to tell what was natural movement and what was large bodies under the surface, nosing curiously at a foreign object. One end of the surfboard had a long, distinctive bite taken straight out of it where a horse had unhinged its jaw and clamped down.

“Okay.” She checked her portable, strapped securely to her forearm. “Low tide, check. Resident temperature is… “ Cooler than yesterday’s, as the daylight continued to shorten. Winter storms would be rolling in soon. The remaining waffling horses would either have to commit to becoming land animals for a season or retreat to deeper waters.

The readings looked good. She fiddled with another set of dials on her equipment, and then opened the safety casing and flicked the activation switch.

Dampener technology was what allowed human colonists to cling to survival on Altea, according to the official Garrison PR that didn’t want to hang too much praise on the necks of capricious nighthorses. Canceling out the transmission of psychic communications allowed human brains to go unmolested by horses or dangerous vermin. What had never been successfully accomplished, however, was mechanical communication back on the same wavelength. Horses sent, ghosties sent, humans had to listen. 

Pidge’s fingers had barely left the switch when the calm surface of the water erupted into a frothy boil. Marine creatures darted out of their burrows in the rocks, swarmed over each other in their sudden panicked frenzy to move, to escape, flooding towards the open mouth of the sea-cave. Fish leapt all the way out of the water, flipping and hurling themselves against even the cave walls, and larger things rocketed across the bottom in explosions of silt and weeds as they threw themselves towards the safety of the open ocean, desperate to leave the cave. Long silver-spined toothfish collided with each other in their panic, thrashing madly near the surface, and she could see the dark fluttering of an eel or some kind of sea snake pouring its coils out of its home in the rocks and writhing towards the cave mouth. Every creature was parting around her floating platform, giving it a wide, terrified berth.

They were all hearing/seeing/sensing the same thing on her broadcast. _::Fierce nighthorse male, boss nighthorse hunting, hungry nighthorse.::_ Drift’s warning message to the spooks and vermin in his territory that he was out for blood. 

“Yeah!” Her shout echoed strangely off the walls. She’d spent years arguing with Matt about whether psychic transmission could be dissected and studied like radio waves, electrical impulses. He insisted that a mechanical substitute, if it was even possible to build one, couldn’t possibly fool another horse. She insisted that it didn’t have to, as long as it could clear an area of spooks.

Not all spooks are afraid of horses, he’d said. 

Clutching her transmitter tightly to her chest, she saw a nighthorse that must have been lurking near the rocky bottom of the cave rear up suddenly from the boiling waters, slender ears pinned and legs churning white froth, its jaw gaping in a threat display. It shook its weed-draped mane furiously and screamed loud enough to make her wince away, its howling shriek amplified to painful levels inside the cave confines, and struck out wildly in the general direction of her floating buoy, sending up a white arc of water.

Then it dove, its powerful tail driving it towards the cave mouth with impossible speed. It was leaving. It was _running,_ and it was taking all the other crawling swimming biting ghosties with it. 

She splashed out into the water recklessly, giddy with victory and yelling at the horse and all the others to go on, get out, get out if you know what’s good for you. Months of fine-tuning and calibration. Months of scraping together spare parts, bargaining and bartering and dumpster-diving and outright stealing, pulling apart junked devices for the smallest component. She’d cobbled together a machine under her goddamn bed that all the other Garrison scientists hadn’t been able to build in their cutting edge labs with their cutting edge materials and access to resources. 

The water came up to her waist, and she activated the short-range motion sensors and thermal imaging on her portable to scan for lifeforms. Nothing beeped at her. The bottom was empty, the rocks were empty, she could swim out as far as she wanted.

She could take this up into the mountains. Not right now, because she still needed to test it against more creatures in more environments, but soon. Soon. She’d driven off a wild horse and a school of toothfish, each as long as her arm. She already knew it worked on grassland predators that hung around the town walls, eager for garbage. 

“Okay,” she said to herself, or to the shade of her brother. “Okay. First things first. Sustained broadcasts. At what point does the signal lose authenticity.” She reached into the water for the buoy’s tether, already slimy and green, and began hauling the whole thing back in towards her. Size was another issue. How compact could she make this? How much battery life could she give it? 

_It would be easier if you had an engineer,_ Matt didn’t say from behind her, and she turned her head to snap at him, still pulling on the rope as she began to step backwards towards the slowly shrinking beach. How was she supposed to trust other people with this, especially people at the Garrison? How was she supposed to tell anyone ‘it’s not just because I really desperately want to go look at an empty massacred village from last year?’

She didn’t see the small dip in the water near the cave mouth, the thing Lance had taught her to always, always look for. Evidence of a large body traveling beneath the surface. She didn’t register the barely there increase in sound of the waves washing against the walls. Another step back and she was in water up to her thighs, wobbling a little on the rocks. 

It hit her fast and hard, a sudden weight slamming into her leg and sweeping it out from under her. Her yelp was cut off, cold saltwater closing over her head abruptly, shocking the breath out of her lungs, and she let go out of the buoy rope, flailing blindly with her hands. Her portable was blinking rapid red, now, lighting up with alarm. 

A two meter razorfin eel, fully grown and much bigger than the one she’d seen earlier, finished pulling its frilled, dark body out of the rocky outcropping it had been coiling around. It mouth gaped open like a horse’s, its long needle teeth bristling. It was thicker around than her thigh, and a female. A female defending a nest. She remembered, suddenly, the savagely mauled devil lantern that had not been eaten. 

Pidge tried to edge herself back, but the eel advanced, its wide staring eyes fixed on her movements. Her lungs burned. If she could stand up-- but it would still bite her, it would sink its teeth in and wrap around her and squeeze, shearing off chunks of flesh once it had a good grip. An eel bite might not kill her outright, but it was a long climb and a long trek back to the Garrison, and this cave would be flooding in a few hours. There would be blood in the water and blood in the air. 

She reached back slowly for the stunner pistol strapped to her thigh. The razorfin rippled dangerously, coiling itself like it was gathering for a lunge.

Something huge and dark slammed down into the water between them. Pidge saw an explosion of bubbles, an explosion of slick dark movement that could’ve been the eel, and then she was shoving to her feet, breaking the surface for huge, gasping breaths and already running, struggling towards the back of the cave. Water splashed and roiled behind her, but when she reached the rocky ground and yanked her pistol free, putting her back against the cave wall, there was nothing left to see. Bubbles disappearing in the turbulence of dark water, and an agitated surface. 

Her legs trembled beneath her. Her hands shook as she gripped the pistol. She wanted Matt. She wanted Willow. She wanted her dad, and Drift, and her mom, and Shiro and Moon and she didn’t want to be here in this cold dark cave, she didn’t want to be alone, why did she have to do this by herself, why wasn’t there anybody that would do this with her--

Her dampeners crackled with static. She put a hand up, ready to fling the whole thing off her head, ready to scream at the whole planet with her unprotected mind, but seeing the cracked screen of her portable distracted her. The broadcast had been shut off, and she’d destroyed her very expensive portable. Her instructors were going to throw a fit. 

The surface of the water remained undisturbed except for a few bubbles. She watched them dully, not sure if she wanted to cry or not. She was bleeding after all, a long shallow scrape down her leg, and her hands felt abraded. The tide was slowly creeping in, and so were the sea ghosties. She saw a ripple of fins break the surface near the cave mouth. Something bumped and jolted her buoy.

When the water was only inches away from her boots, she unfolded herself from where she’d been curled against the cave wall and shook out her climbing ropes. She would come back for her data later. She needed to get inside and make sure her dampeners weren’t damaged, and clean herself up, and pretend for all the people that might look at her that she was fine. 

She latched on her carabiners, and began to climb.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Brig why are you tearing your hair out  
> \- I'm writing a fanfic about pidge fighting a giant moray eel that nobody asked for  
> \- ...well okay
> 
> Also, points for anyone who guesses who Val Holt is named for.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At long last: actual nsfw content.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised I'd get there with the warning tags. Also this probably should have been broken up different, but yolo.

***

Matt was dreaming.

He knew it was a dream because in it he was warm and well-fed, comfortable, tucked in his old bed in his old room at the research outpost. It was winter outside the walls, fat flakes of snow drifting down gently and soundlessly, but he was tucked snug in his bed, surrounded by books and journals piled high on the blankets and the soft-edged yellow light of his bedside lamp. It was after midnight. The entire outpost, maybe the entire world was asleep, except for him and his books.

And his sister, who was not in her room across the hall. He couldn’t have told anyone how he knew it, but it was simple fact that if he pulled himself from the warm cocoon of his blankets and padded into the hallway, he would see darkness under her door, and maybe even a deceptively realistic lump under the heavy covers if he should peer inside her room, but the air would be cold and still and devoid of human presence. Tricks that had fooled their parents and their teachers over the years never fooled him. 

She would be down in the workroom, probably, losing herself in some complicated project. Weird dreams, she’d say with a shrug if anyone took her to task over it. Restless hands, restless mind. The work doesn’t care what time it is. 

The more superstitious of the colonists who had lived on Altea for many years said that the dreams of the animals, of the earth itself, crept into your head the longer you stayed, and would get stronger near the turn of the seasons. Winter was time for burrowing and sleeping, warm dens full of warm bodies, slow-moving dreams under the frozen ground. 

A rider had said that to him. Matt liked the phrase so much he’d noted it down on his portable while Katie rolled her eyes. Planets don’t dream, she didn’t say, but she might as well have said it because Matt knew she wanted to say it, the same way Matt didn’t say _I’ve been having these weird thoughts lately,_ and wanted to.

The rider had tipped her hat to them, and to their father, who was not really a rider but some strange species of in-between, a civilian too precious to be spared for the usual rider duties but bonded to a nighthorse that had once been a king stallion. Drift had led wild herds in his youth. Drift had sired foals and fought rivals and looked after babies, and then decided one day to leave that life behind and attach himself to a human man who liked old books and the dehydrated peas they served on deep space missions and forgot his glasses at least once a day. 

Drift kept them all on Altea, but Matt found he didn’t mind the change so much. There were other planets in the universe to explore, maybe other planets with more fascinating ecosystems or more scientifically relevant evolutions to discover, but Altea was an endless treasure trove of information in itself. What other planet had a living memory in the form of its creatures? What other planet would share its secrets mind-to-mind, inviting humans in like symbiotes to co-exist with its apex predator species?

In the warmth of his room, he couldn’t hear Drift in the ambient. This was before the barracks, before the horse-camps, when they lived in Garrison-provided housing for the researchers and no one knew what to do with an aberrant nighthorse calmly grazing in the front yard. Drift patiently tolerated the ridiculousness of buildings that would not allow him to come and go as he pleased among humans, the way the barracks and other camp structures were built open to the horses. Even shifted to his smallest size, Drift was built like a heavy breed, broad hooves wrapped in feathery tufts of hair and enormous round cheekbones. 

To strangers he seemed huge and alien and threatening, but to the Holts, who had seen him shifted into the dragon-form favored by horses that came from the high reaches of the mountains, he was considerately compact, and it was hard to think of any creature as threatening after you’d seen them backing carelessly into a fence to scratch their rear, and cracking that fence under the weight, and then spooking away at the noise.

Drift thought of Matt and his sister as _::foals::_ or sometimes _::pushy weanlings,::_ which was not endearing to anyone who knew anything about herd dynamics for Earth horses, but Drift seemed content to consider all of them part of his herd, perhaps in a way a younger stallion would not have. Riders remarked on it. More often than not, a nighthorse bonding meant a separation from family, friends, and previous career. Nighthorses were notoriously possessive. 

It wasn’t Drift that called him out of his room that night, though. It was a tickle in the back of his head, tiny flashes of distracting thoughts swimming in and out of the phrases in the books he was trying to concentrate on. Snow outside. The winter sky outside. Steaming gusts of breath in the cold air.

And then, very clearly: _::dark winter woods.::_ An image so powerful in the ambient the broadcaster could have been in the room with him, that when Matt looked up from the words on the page he and his bed were sitting in a forest clearing, surrounded by the black trunks of winter-bare trees in every direction. His breath misted in front of him. His lungs were full of cold forest scent, clean new snow, still air. Skeletal tree branches reached up towards the soft fluffy grayness of the cloud cover. Snowflakes danced down to the piles of books, and everything was so quiet. 

In his memory, there were other things that had happened then. He had taken the time to be scared, to be anxious, he had marked his place and set his books aside, cautiously eased out of bed and crept to his parents’ door and then to his sister’s, he had pulled warmer clothes out and dressed himself, he had reset alarms and waited for time-release locks and walked through long hallways. He had taken the time to realize that Katie was in her workroom with dampeners on, awake at this hour, for reasons other than simple restlessness or project mania. He had detoured into the kitchen, seeing snowfall out of the corners of his vision the whole time. The rooms kept disappearing into images of forest if he let them.

In the dream, he was simply outside in the next moment, standing in that clearing without having walked there, clutching the edges of a heavy horse blanket around his shoulders. The sweep of it behind him brushed the top of the new fallen snow like a train. His breath puffed in front of him. 

He should have been afraid, leaving the safety of the great armored walls, walking out into the soft darkness of the night. There were spooks even so close to an outpost with regular patrols and regular horse traffic. There were nests of vermin that ordinarily scavenged garbage but would be happy to attack a foolish human leg thrust down into their hidden burrow under the snow, and the smell of blood would whip them into a frenzy after the first bite. A man could be mauled by ghosties the size of mice, if there were enough of them, and eaten alive if they got him down on the ground. 

The rules were simple for every village, every city, every shack out in the barren stretches of the wilderness: don’t go out beyond the walls. Don’t go out because of dreams, don’t go out to voices or pictures in the beckoning darkness. Predators lured and beguiled. 

The blazing lights of the outpost behind him filtered dimly through the trees. He had not brought a lantern, or a pistol, or even a knife, and his heart was pounding furiously, but he was not afraid. 

He stood in the powdery snowdrifts, sunk up to the calves of his snowboots and shivering under his blanket, one skinny arm outstretched to the endless woods, holding a cupped palmful of brown sugar, and the nighthorse that materialized out of a flurry of snowflakes stretched out her long, graceful neck and nibbled it from his hand as delicately as a cat. 

She was smaller than Drift. Her chest was more leanly muscled, her shoulders narrower. There was no feathering around her comparatively dainty hooves, just ice-balls frozen into the longer unshorn strands at the fetlock, which proved she had not come from a horse-camp, where even riderless horses had their feet seen to. Her breath was warm on his skin, her muzzle velvet-soft. Her mane was long and flowing and she peered bright-eyed at him from underneath it, beguiling. He brushed it away from her eyes as she pushed her nose into his chest, tucking the fine dark strands behind her delicately curved ear as tenderly as a lover. She nosed curiously at his flat human face, whuffing into his own messy hair. Memorizing his smell, associating it with _::boy in the snow carrying sweets, soft hand boy.::_

_::Matt,::_ he sent back, dazed and awed by the flow of pictures from her mind. She was a high country horse from deeper in the Wild than had ever been explored. She’d seen things no human had ever seen, traveled places no human had ever been to. She had crossed mountain ranges for him, followed human roads and clashed with other territorial herds in the lowlands, seeking. Seeking for so, so long, a restlessness she could barely understand driving her down from the pine forests where she’d been born, away from her range, away from her herd-mates. She was nervous around human encampments but she’d haunted this one for more than a week, _::wanting::_ a human mind that winked at her like sunlight sparking off gold in a rock face, there and gone again. A mind that kept disappearing into silence, a mind of clockwork and obsession and curious order. She liked the flavor of meticulousness, though it was wholly alien to her. 

Katie, he’d realized slowly. She’d come for Katie. 

But the nighthorse snorted out a great cloud of steam and pawed at the snow, denying. She had called, and he had answered, so it was him that she had come for. She sent her name through the ambient, and in the dream he knew what it was. His trembling mouth shaped the word ‘Willow,’ soundless. 

The disparate pictures in the ambient of _::boy in the snow::_ and _::cold nighthorse female::_ became _::Matt in the snow::_ and _::cold Willow,::_ and then shifted in one heartstopping lurch into _::Matt-and-Willow,::_ loud and joyful in the ambient. One entity, one picture, and he was smiling and laughing even as tears slipped in freezing tracks down his cheeks, wiped away by her warm wet tongue, because she had found him and he had found her, and they were together now. They were together, and neither of them would ever have to be alone again. 

The dream stuttered forward. Shameseytown. The rider barracks in the horse-camp, noisy and crowded and lively, nothing like the quiet, white walls of the science divisions. 

Matt and Willow older, more sure of each other, but still young enough that her heat had crept up on them both like a stalking creature. Nighthorses could and did mate recreationally without intent to breed, and as a shapeshifting species they weren’t strictly pinned to one gender. Stallions mounted other stallions and mares mounted other mares and young randy yearlings mounted anything that would let them, rutting for pleasure. A coupling could demonstrate favor in the herd hierarchy, to show dominance or submission, to work off the frustration of a thwarted breeding or just to pass the time. 

Seasonal heat, autumn heat, was another beast entirely. 

At first he thought he’d been getting sick. Fevered skin, faint barely there ripples of cramps in his belly. Noises and lights that were too loud, and he could feel the weight of eyes on him like physical touches, scraping along his nerves, making him uncharacteristically snappish. Riders liked to stare anyway, veiled little looks of interest at the prodigy scientist-turned-rider, as if Matt hadn’t gone through the same extensive training every junior rider endured. 

Garrison had decided that Sam Holt wasn’t a fluke, not with another horse in the family and the possibility of more in the future, and set both Matt and Sam up as genuine riders. Their duties still leaned heavily towards the scientific, and they’d been assigned a senior rider as a sort of bodyguard/mentor rather than send rookie Matt and rookie Sam to serve as juniors on separate squads, but they were in the barracks and they were out in the Wild just like everyone else. They rode the same supply lines, they stocked shelters, they killed vermin. Matt learned how to handle a firearm from Shiro and Sam learned to translate images from the horses, drawing out fascinating memories of places in the Deep Wild that no human had ever seen. 

(The scientific community refused to accept the idea of papers based on interviews with _horses,_ so Sam learned quickly to pour emphasis on rider anecdotes.)

No one was _rude,_ precisely, not in the way the kids in school used to be rude. Horses taught harsh lessons about pursuing grudges without good reason. But there were always eyes on him, and Shiro confessed to him, one day, stumbling awkwardly over the words, that the camp horses were likely interested in Willow, a young healthy mare from an outside lineage.

Or their riders were interested in Matt. Becoming a rider meant shedding some of the rules of civilian life whether you wanted to or not, and Matt had blushed furiously as Shiro tried to delicately describe the infamous open matings that happened when you had too many eligible bachelors and jealous, competitive alpha mares in a small territory. The rider barracks didn’t leave a lot of illusions about privacy. Horses dragged their riders into fights and lust-drunk bad decisions all the time, and juniors were notoriously loud in the ambient, notoriously susceptible to the influence of horse-pairs rolling across the camp like a storm. 

An open mating was supposed to be worse. An open mating was supposed to be battering waves of lust and violence, infectious as panic, people forgetting they were people instead of beasts. 

Your mare will take care of you, Shiro managed to say, trying to be reassuring about it and failing, as someone bonded to a stallion that had never needed to fight for a mare’s attention. She won’t let anything happen that you can’t tolerate. 

Matt had no idea what he could tolerate. He was no virgin, but open matings weren’t the same as two horses sidling up to each in the dark and negotiating their dalliance with a couple snorts and nips and angry squeals. Open matings were mares encouraging fights among the stallions, inducing rut or inflaming the ones already there, fighting other mares, whipping potential suitors into a wild frenzy of instinct and hormones and leading them on a violent, exhaustive chase, a test of stamina. Open matings were knife fights among the riders and horses lamed, crippled, turned savage and berserk. 

Usually, an experienced rider with a mare about to go into heat or a stallion into rut would steal quietly out of the horse-camp, pretending that it wasn't desertion. Better not to drop that bomb in close quarters, better to escape out to the grasslands or the forest and spend a few days in one of the shelters and let Garrison turn a blind eye. The most avid suitors would typically follow anyway, but it cut down on collateral damage among young, stupid horses and young, stupid juniors that didn’t know when it was better not to get involved, and nobody had to explain it to the horseless.

But some riders, Shiro warned him, got too caught up in the fear, and their horses took them deep into the Wild instead, fleeing from imaginary demons. Sometimes they ran into vermin that knew how to stalk a distracted horse. Sometimes they ran into wild herds that didn’t mind the lust-drunk horse but would take exception to a lust-drunk human as an unbalanced, unhealthy intruding mind, and would tear them apart.

Matt had hoped, in some small cowardly part of his heart, that Willow would make things easy on him and reciprocate the outrageous flirtations of Shiro’s stallion. He’d hoped that she would notice how being around Shiro made him feel. Sometimes horses paired off so easily it was like they had planned for it, no fights, no uncertainty, no open mating nonsense, and with both Matt and Shiro’s minds in constant contact through the ambient it wasn’t as if he could hide his interest from an experienced rider. 

Shiro never said anything, though. Shiro was never anything less than professional when there were other people around. He’d come from the Garrison and Matt knew that the issues of license, of fraternization among the rider irregulars, weighed more heavily on him than on some of the others. Garrison still considered him their golden boy in a lot of ways, and they preferred that he hold himself to higher standards, which meant not allowing any kind of horse business to color his professional relationships. As far as Garrison was concerned Shiro was escorting two valuable civilian scientists, instead of being a senior rider mentoring two juniors. It was Shiro’s job to talk Matt through the dangers of an open mating, to explain (in horrible, minute, graphic detail) exactly what Matt ought to prepare himself for, and not to do anything about it himself. 

And Willow, being Willow, wasn’t worried about it. She let Moon pamper her and bring her tidbits and snort at other stallions that nosed after her, and then danced away whenever he tried to take things further. Willow hadn’t made up her mind about anything, yet, and frankly didn’t understand why her rider couldn’t work things out on his own with another rider. She teased Matt with images of _::spring-virgin mare spooking away from handsome stallion,::_ and Matt scowled and sent back _::Willow covered in mud, unbrushed for a week.::_

Part of it was that Shiro worked with so many juniors. He was a steady hand and a good teacher, and Matt understood his hesitations. Nothing could be done to make Moon less of a flirt, but Shiro didn’t hide behind his horse. He controlled his own actions. He wanted to be seen as dependable. He was even sponsoring a student with his own pay, an orphan boy he’d rescued from one of the high mountain villages who rarely spoke but walked fearlessly among the horses like he’d been born one of them. The villagers had been terrified that he wasn’t actually human. 

Shiro had paid for him-- _paid_ for him, like a sack of flour, he’d told Matt angrily-- and brought him back to Shameseytown to take the entrance exams for Garrison. The flight program couldn’t snap him up fast enough, and even a junior like Matt could tell that the kid-- who was not actually a kid, being nearly Matt’s age and hardened by his early life the High Wild in ways most people would never understand-- was destined to become a rider. 

He worshipped the ground Shiro walked on. Matt, quietly despairing, could relate. 

But Willow went her own way. She gave him no warning. She was restless, but she was always restless at the change of seasons, and he felt irritable and out of sorts, uncomfortable in his own skin. Smells were too smelly, noises too loud, lights too bright. People cawing and chattering in his ears like carrion birds, picking at his nerves. He buried his nose in a research journal and skipped classes, his stomach roiling with something that wasn’t quite nausea. 

Riders kept glancing at him. He was aware of them in a way he’d never been before, how many people in black leathers moved among the crowds, how they stood together and spoke with quiet voices and watched him from the corner of their eyes. His shoulders kept trying to rise defensively, and every time someone boldly met his gaze he could feel the tips of his ears go hot. 

He wanted them to come over to him. He wanted them to stay right where they were, far away from him. 

He’d tried to brush off his own irritability until someone went to rest a hand on his shoulder and he’d knocked it off without even thinking, lips peeling back in a sudden feral snarl. There were too many people crowding him and he backed against the wall, suddenly unable to bear it. A space cleared out around him and he heard Willow’s shriek of outrage all the way across the camp, high and piercing and terrible. 

Everyone had stopped to stare at him. Everyone was _looking_ at him with various expressions of surprise and alarm and hunger, the riders among them pushing forward suddenly, closing in on him like predators. Horses drifted near as well, and the ambient was suddenly thick and choking. He was surrounded, just like Willow, by _::wanting.::_

He’d bolted.

She met him halfway, scattering other horses and people out of her path like a cat bowling through a flock of frightened pigeons. Her black hide was already flecked with foamy lather and her ears were pinned back, snaking out her neck to herd him in close like a foal as he threw his arms around her neck, burying his face against her. She stood over him, trembling, nostrils blowing wide and red, her massive jaws gaping open in a threat display and a low ugly snarling bubbling up from her chest, a distinctly unhorse-like sound.

People had followed them both. Horses, riders, civilians. Willow bunched her hindquarters and kicked out to the side with an outraged squeal, a lightning fast cow kick that thumped against something that squealed in turn. Hooves drummed on the packed earth and Matt clung tighter, hiding under the long fall of her mane. 

He’d lost his rider jacket somewhere in his headlong flight and quickly tore out of his shirt, the fabric intolerable against his sensitive, flushed skin, leaving him bare-armed in a faded gray tanktop and his uniform pants. His chest heaved, and so did hers. Her mind was full of _::angry nighthorse female, hot wind scents, sweat and males, intolerable males.::_

He agreed wholeheartedly with _::intolerable males.::_ He was furious, he wanted to cry; Shiro was out on patrol duty and wouldn’t be back for another two days. Shiro was supposed to _be here_ to help him, and he wasn’t, and Matt was so mad he could barely think. There was something he was supposed to do when Willow’s heat came. Rules, warnings he was supposed to remember-- but they were gone under the flood of hormones and Willow-in-heat. 

His skin prickled because hers did. He could feel her in a visceral way he’d never experienced before, every shiver of her skin, every exhalation of her strong lungs. The trembling of her muscles, flooded with adrenaline. The wetness of her sex. 

_::Males,::_ they scented together. _::Interested males, males in rut.::_

_::Not here,::_ Matt begged, clinging to some tiny scrap of self underneath the whirling maelstrom of her heat. He was hard in his underwear, he was so, so hard, he wanted and didn’t want to be touched, he wanted relief, he wanted to _::bite,::_ but mostly he wanted _::not here, dark quiet den-nest-safe-space.::_

Willow agreed. She was shifting even as she knelt for him to clamber gracelessly astride, her massive wings fanning out as he clung to her brief harness. People yelled after him, other riders, but their voices were meaningless against the roil of the ambient. Matt and Willow needed _::away.::_

The shore battery shelter was an abandoned fortification that had been given over to the use of the riders in the early years of colonization, after the first arrivals quickly realized that nothing that came from the sea was more dangerous than the ghosties that prowled outside their palisade walls. Shore patrol used it, riders used it, and Willow landed in a thunderous flurry of wings, scattering sand and brush and a few terrified nests of vermin.   
Matt slid to the ground on rubbery legs, sweating despite the cool wind and his lack of clothing, stumbling to the door while Willow remained shifted, her great claws tearing furrows in the earth, twisting her head this way and that in the sea breeze.

_::Males coming,::_ she smelled, snarling, and Matt snarled with her. They were still too close to the camp, but it was an improvement over Willow in her dragon form destroying the earth dens near the barracks and Matt was afraid of going directionless _::out into the wild, out into the open sky::_ the way Willow half-wanted. 

_::Looking for Moon,::_ flickered across his mind, and who knew if it was his thought or Willow’s, but Matt didn’t know which patrol route Shiro and Moon had taken. His head was too fogged to try and piece a map together, even if they had time to spare.

Which they didn’t. He could feel it. 

_::Cool dark safe den here,::_ he sent back, jumbled and shaky but as firm as he could, and pulled the heavy steel door open. He sucked down a deep breath, borrowing Willow’s senses to taste the air.

Empty of vermin. Safe. 

He wasted no time getting rid of the rest of his clothes and tearing into the supplies he’d need, thoughtfully supplied by previous tenants. Immuno-patches, lubricant, heat-aids. Willow was keening now, both out loud and in his head, feeling empty and aching while Matt prepared himself hurriedly and shivered his way down a thick, bulbous silicone toy that would have daunted him under any other circumstances. He wailed when he slid down the last inch, stuffed full and still not enough, not _real,_ and Willow wailed with him, lifting her brassy, ringing voice above the crash of the waves. His thighs trembled as he lifted himself up and began to bounce carefully on the heavy toy, his own cock hard as iron and drooling against his thigh, but he didn’t want to touch himself. He wanted what Willow wanted, he wanted something huge and thick inside him, pumping in and out, something to clench down on as it filled him with hot seed. He wanted _::full swollen belly, baby growing inside.::_

He came like that, untouched, howling his need, and it only barely banked the edges of the fire burning inside him. Come spattered all over his chest and belly and he panted raggedly, stomach muscles jumping, but he was still hard, still unfulfilled. 

He wanted _::male.::_ Willow agreed, clawing at the earth.

_::Strong male. Right male.::_

A many-voiced roar rang out as if in response to the thought. Matt’s eyes snapped open, seeing what Willow saw: beating wings in a riot of colors, draconic bodies arrowing in to their location, landing on the beach, scrabbling and squabbling for perches on the low headland cliffs. Willow hissed warningly, mantling, but at the same time she was satisfied that so many had followed her. The ambient was wild and full of mating urges, full of _::strong male here, strongest male, best mate, fighting other males.::_

And there were riders, too. Boots on the sand, boots on the concrete of the shelter’s antechamber. Riders shoving each other, fighting to be the first in. Blood and sore knuckles, panting breaths, gritted teeth. 

He didn’t see them so much as he saw what they were seeing in the ambient, themselves in a loose ring, fever-eyed and panting, sweaty and shirtless and addicted, their minds bombarding him with _::beautiful boy with feral amber eyes and bared teeth, beautiful pale-skinned boy, slender thighs to wrap around their waists, soft mouth to wrap around their cocks, tight warm slick-slide insides to receive their seed.::_

Willow squealed in fury and lust, her tail lashing. Wingtips stroked hers and weaving heads tried to nose at her, falling back when she surged forward and pressing near whenever she would allow it. Matt pinned the nearest rider in the semi-circle with a molten gaze, looking at himself looking at the rider through the ambient. The rider halted instantly, quivering, pants rucked down around his hips. His cock peeked out of the open vee of fabric, large and nearly purple, already wet at the tip. 

He wanted Matt to suck it. He wanted Matt to service him while his beast mounted Willow and bred her full of his get. The rider’s hands fondled his balls restlessly thinking about it, eyes glazed and mouth slack, wanting _::wet hot mouth, eager mouth sucking.::_

Matt didn’t want his cock and Willow didn’t want his stallion. Willow’s head shot out, teeth snapping dangerously to make the males crowding her recoil, and Matt spread his thighs deliberately for a different rider in the circle, a lean, scarred woman with muscled arms who knew better than to demand anything in the ambient. 

Invited to approach, she showed him _::lovely boy::_ and _::knowing ache, knowing emptiness::_ in the ambient, and wrapped a warm, firm hand around his bare ankle, soothing, as she crawled up the length of his body. He wouldn’t have noticed that he was trembling otherwise. Her voice hummed gentle words and endearments, stroking him like he was a nervous colt and letting him get used to her touch and scent. 

His overheated brain threw _::Shiro, wanting Shiro::_ into the ambient, perhaps ungratefully, but his chest was heaving and Willow was no comfort to him now, full of rampant instinct, and every rider in the room was looking at him like a juicy piece of meat. Not one of them knew his name, and he didn’t know theirs-- senior riders, nearly all of them, their horses motivated by experience to chase an outsider female like Willow for the chance at expanding the gene pool. 

Instead of recoiling or taking exception the woman agreed with him, echoing _::handsome rider, kind eyes strong hands::_ at the image of Shiro. She didn’t mind at all if Matt chose-- needed-- to think of someone else, and if he concentrated there was another figure in her thoughts as well, a dark-skinned woman in a Garrison uniform.

But the Garrison woman was horseless and the rider’s stallion insistent in her mind, driving her on the same way Willow was driving Matt, and Shiro was probably leagues away, somewhere out in the wild. Matt’s throat closed on a soft keen and the rider shushed him gently, kissing his cheek. 

_::Needing now,::_ she reminded him, palming his wet stomach as she slid between the cradle of his thighs. She slicked her hand with his own spend and reached down underneath him to play with the toy inside him, rocking it in and out, making him moan and forget everything except the sensation of something hard and thick moving in him, rubbing perfectly against his inner walls. Her teeth scraped gently over a taut nipple and he cried out, arching for her. 

As the rider teased him to a second shuddering climax, Willow flung herself into the sky with an earsplitting roar, boiling over with borrowed lust. Her sex was wet and twitching, empty aching, and she wanted what Matt had, she wanted _::moving inside, mounting, breeding with strong perfect male.::_ Every beast on the cliffs took off after her, taking up her roar, wings pumping and straining to catch her. Her suitors were salties and lowland horses, far-ranging high country males and even a few wild horses in the mix, snappish and lean and aggressive among the bonded stallions. A couple enterprising mares had trailed along in hopes of enticing a rejected stallion, happy to ride Willow’s coattails, but they stayed well away from the snarling, squabbling pack that wheeled out over the white-caps of the bay. 

Willow had a strong lead, the ocean wind whipping over her scales like a teasing touch. She snaked her head back under her wing to shrill at the pack of males, half of whom were too busy raking and tearing at each other to concentrate on gaining speed. Streamers of red-black blood spiralled away in the air, spattering the waves like raindrops as combatants howled in rage and pain. Interested salties bobbed to the surface, sleek heads uplifted to view the commotion.

A big male tried to pull abreast of her and foul her wings, hoping to trap her and reduce her speed. Willow shrieked at him and eeled away, forcing two other beasts to dive sharply or collide with his bulk as he tried, clumsily, to follow her. She swatted down a reaching foreclaw and corkscrewed between air currents, snapping her wings wide to let the updrafts pull her up, up, up. The ambient was full of images of her, full of admiration at her speed and agility and even her fierceness, but every trick she pulled made the males more determined, all of them broadcasting their desire for a strong mate, a clever fierce powerful mate. 

Somewhere in a corner of Willow’s distracted mind was Matt himself, too bound up in Willow to keep coherent track of two separate realities. He was in the air, he was on the ground on soft blankets. Gusts of wind curled along his bare body, the prickle of saltspray, and hands were touching him, stroking, admiring. An anonymous wet mouth closed over his straining cock and he was pulled to pieces between pleasures, muffling her violent instincts in the longing to breed, to let one of the males cover her. 

Willow keened out her rider’s lust and Matt enjoyed the eager snorting of the first beast that closed with her, scales rasping together, claw to claw, organs sliding wetly in mid-air. Her great wings fanned wide to support them. She was not defeated, or trapped, she was _permitting,_ and she thrust the stallion away, spent and exhausted when he had finished pleasing her, arching her spine in invitation for another to take his place. 

Body after body mounted her, pleasured her, spilled inside her too quickly as she encouraged their flagging stamina with trills and hisses. It wasn’t the first stallion that was important, it was the last stud who would fuck out the inferior seed of his predecessors. 

A handful of suitors had already dropped out the air, sated or exhausted or put off by her teeth or more interested in catching each other, if she wouldn’t be caught. There were bodies on the beach and in the water, writhing together lazily, and she snorted her disdain for those not up to the challenge of winning her. The males still aloft were strong, healthy, excellent studs that would likely give her strong foals, but none of them particularly stood out to her. She pushed herself higher, watching with some impatience as they laboriously flapped after her like crows. 

She wasn’t expecting a new voice to bellow a challenge from above. She flung her head up, flaring her wings in surprise as a streamlined shape rocketed past like a missile, barrelling directly into the knot of males still chasing her. Another stud, young, still under full harness. A sleek, agile beast, glittering black scales and impressive horns, snapping and clawing furiously at the yowling pack as if he meant to hold them all off on his own, impressing Willow with his ferocity.

A bigger, older stud came at him and caught him across the shoulder with a raking blow, and the newcomer roared out in pain. The hot metallic tang of blood filled her nostrils as she banked above them both, uncertain. The older stud had his sight fixed on his rival, violence on his mind, ignoring her completely. 

At least until she came shrieking down at him in a steep dive, claws outstretched. He hissed at her, shocked, sending _::my female, my mate::_ and she went for him again in outraged defiance, scraping her fangs along his armored scales until he ducked away from the onslaught. He spiralled down out of the sky, bugling his confusion and irritation at _::intolerable females::_ while Willow and the late arrival beat up together, forming a snarling, angry wall that the stragglers of the mating flight shied away from, abruptly realizing that they’d missed their window of opportunity. There was only one male she would tolerate in the sky with her now, drawing alongside her, and she licked tenderly at the bleeding scratch along his side until he chuffed and nosed her away, more interested in twining their necks together, meeting claw to claw, bodies aligning. He took her vigorously, scattering out the seed of the stallions that had covered her before. 

Lost in the haze of Willow’s pleasure, Matt didn’t hear the door to the shelter being thrown open. He didn’t hear the raised voices, the impact of flesh on flesh. The ambient swirled with pictures that only half made sense, scales and sky from the flight going on high above their heads interspersed with tight focused, tunnel vision snapshots. A hand dragging blunt nails down sweat-slick skin. An open, gasping mouth. A tangle of limbs, the smell of leather and sex. 

The mouth on his was dragged away. Matt whined, reaching blindly at the sudden absence of warmth, and a hard, bruising grip closed around his wrist, hauling him bodily to his feet-- no, _lifting_ him, crushing him against a hard muscular body that smelled like pine forest and sweaty nighthorse, leather and something so, so familiar…

Hands on his face, cupping his cheeks. A voice calling his name from somewhere far away. His body screamed for attention, empty and wanting, and he blinked futilely against the wash of chaos from the ambient, halfway to fury at being interrupted and ready to snarl at the intruder, blaring _::empty aching cold, needing touch, body craving::_ to force whoever it was to their knees.

Instead of cowed acceptance or another bright carnal burst of _::wanting sex, wanting boy,::_ he was answered fiercely with _::Matt in sunlight at the shore. Matt making notes in his research journals, Matt smiling, Matt watching intently during a training class. Hands close together on a horse’s neck, not quite touching. Matt with gold and amber in his hair.::_

“Shiro,” he whispered, stunned, falling back into his body with a sudden dizzy rush. His eyes were blind in the ambient, he couldn’t see anything except the image sideways from other riders. _::Tall strong handsome rider, fresh from patrol, dusty leathers, bleeding scratches.::_ Matt’s hands groped blindly, urgently, and found broad shoulders, short cropped hair. 

“I’m here,” Shiro whispered against his temple, something like helplessness in his voice. His jacket was gone somewhere, his belt undone, and the cool steel of the wall pressed against Matt’s back as Shiro lifted and held him there like he weighed nothing at all. 

Matt clung to him, curving his legs around Shiro’s hips, linking his ankles together and bracing himself. Shiro was huge and hot underneath him, thighs bunched, stomach muscles flexing, eager as any yearling stallion. He was trembling with the effort of holding himself back, and it came through the ambient in sudden startling clarity that Shiro was a virgin. He’d held himself to the Garrison’s austere standards until people stopped asking, until people whispered that he was cold behind his smiles and his stallion was a miserable cocktease, and he was afraid of hurting someone, he was afraid of hurting Matt-- 

_::Mounting,::_ Willow prompted, demanding, Matt with her, open-mouthed and pleading against Shiro’s skin. Shiro trembled again, this time more violently, until Matt found his soft mouth and kissed his half-formed protests quiet, loosened his hold to sink lower, letting Shiro’s wet tip tease across his skin. Nothing could hurt him, nothing was painful, they were together and everything was going to be okay.

Shiro groaned deeply and slid into Matt’s well-prepared body in one smooth motion, conquered by the combined effort of three wills, sheathing himself deep inside where he belonged.

_::Mine, with me, here with me,::_ Matt babbled into the ambient, a soft delirious stream of nonsense as Moon covered Willow and Shiro covered her rider, over and over again until they were alone in the shelter, all the other riders driven off by the waves of _::mated pair, bonded pair::_ coming from the horses. Until Shiro shakily, faltering, _scared_ for the first time in his life, sent it back. 

_::With you,::_ he said helplessly, out loud and in the ambient, curling even closer around Matt as they moved together on the messy blankets. _::With you always.::_

***

The prisoner convoy traveled for days, or maybe weeks. At first Matt had tried to keep a careful count of the rest periods until he realized the guards were periodically drugging their food and water, and moving them while they slept.

It seemed impossible that they could go so far underground. The slope of the road-- and it was a road, ancient and pitted-- wavered between sharp and gentle, and they took a number of detours to avoid cave-ins or other obstacles. At one point there was a faint, sickly green light up ahead of them in the tunnels, visible through the narrow slits cut through the metal of the prisoner transport, and Matt could see the guards milling in agitation, hands close to their weapons. The air had been full of a humming noise, and for the first time the order went out to reverse the vehicles and move back to the last rest area.

People had gotten sick after that. Not many, and not for long, but Matt vividly remembered being the only person awake in a transport full of fever-dreamers, listening to their moans and whispers as they reached their hands up in the air, making a forest of grasping fingers in the dark, searching for something that wasn’t there. 

A long time ago he would have been terrified. Not that long ago he would have felt that it wasn’t his place to be here, having this happen to him; he wasn’t a reckless explorer drunk on the idea of charging into the unknown. He was a scientist, a researcher, he was the person that came after the explorers and their half-wild guides. 

But now he was also a rider with a rider’s training, if only by a technicality. He sat stone still in the prisoner transport while seeking fingers brushed blindly over his face, his clothes, and he held Shiro’s hands tightly between his own and pushed _::fierce nighthorse female and rider, bondmates, mated pair::_ into thin air as if Willow were there with him to broadcast it, as if Willow and Moon and Drift were all there with him, backing him.

Searching fingers slid across Shiro’s skin, catching in his short hair. In a sudden uncharacteristic blast of temper Matt blared _:: **mama,** nighthorse mama with baby inside,::_ the most fearsome thing he could think off, calling up the queasy out of body feeling that Willow shared with him as Moon’s foal grew in her belly. 

Every hand in the transport dropped as if a gravity switch had been thrown. The dreamers stopped moaning and twitching and lay still. Something tense and heavy had left the air, warned off or satisfied, and Matt panted raggedly in the darkness, shivering uncontrollably for no reason at all. 

They’d moved on the next day. Whatever the green light had been, Matt didn’t see it again, and there were no more instances of the guards choosing to go backwards along the road.

The only advantage to the travel was that it gave Shiro time to recover. Matt bit his lip guiltily as he did it but gave Shiro doses of the drugged water to keep him quiet, knowing it was kinder to keep him unconscious than to let him sit in the dark and sob over the loss of his-- their-- horses. Matt was doing that enough for all three of them, huddling on his knees over Shiro’s chest, stifling his tears into Shiro’s jacket. He felt like something had been ripped directly from his body, leaving a bloody gaping exit wound, and his scientist’s mind kept supplying rational reasons for it: sympathy pangs for the ‘loss’ of Willow’s foal, as if she’d miscarried. As if _he_ had miscarried, carrying Shiro’s child. 

He bit his hand bloody holding back his grief, not wanting to give the guards any more reason to look twice at him. His stomach hurt from crying, and he wanted to bury himself in Shiro’s arms, but he knew that Shiro, awake, would only be aggressive and helpless in turns like a widower stallion hovering around the absence of a mate. 

He couldn’t think about the fact that he might be going crazy. Riders did go crazy, losing their horses. Horses went crazy losing foals and mates, and pulled down others into their emotional maelstrom. 

Once upon a time he’d thought that fanciful, a romantic exaggeration made up wholecloth by the early colonists on Altea. Humans over-identified with everything, of course, reading tragedies and narratives in the simple realities of natural events, but he’d scoffed at the idea that a so-called “rider” could be so attached to his animal that he’d risk his life for it, or blow his brains out rather than face a life alone.

He knew better, now. 

His dad was in the transport vehicle behind them. Matt saw him at every rest stop, made sure to make eye contact or have a quick, whispered conversation if he could manage it under the indifferent gazes of the guards, trade supplies and any useful information, but he didn’t try to huddle among the group that would be herded back into Sam’s vehicle. 

A townie family would have stayed together, probably. The son of a civilian scientist would have clung to family, would have made excuses that an experienced rider like Shiro could take care of himself. That the aliens were trying to keep as many of them alive as possible and they wouldn’t let anyone die from injuries on the road.

But that was also what the horses had changed inside him. Matt belonged with Shiro and Shiro belonged with Matt in a way that the term ‘lovers’ or ‘boyfriend’ couldn’t possibly begin to encompass. Matt shook with terror every time the guards touched him or grabbed his arm, but he bared his teeth and snarled when they hovered too close to Shiro. Moon-and-Shiro were Willow-and-Matt’s mates, the sire of their baby. A nuclear family for horses, even with Drift in the picture acting as a tolerant boss stallion looking after a mare not furthering his own bloodline. 

The guards seemed to find it amusing. They taunted him with extra scraps of medicine, of blankets, knowing he was hoarding them for Shiro’s sake, and he went along with it every time, flushed and angry and hurting. They grabbed handfuls of his hair and pressed clawed fingers to his mouth, curious at his softness. 

They spoke no English, but would consent to occasionally talk in broken bits of the galactic trade language. They were curious, apparently, that he was a male of his species but had bonded to a female nighthorse, and they laughed at the way he automatically protected his belly when he stumbled or was shoved. 

He didn’t see the masked creature again. As far as he could tell, it wasn’t even with the convoy any longer. The shape of it was already hazy in his memory, as if his mind shied away from recalling sharp details. 

“You need to escape,” Shiro murmured hazily, half-dreaming while Matt changed the dressing on his wound. “You need to-- distress beacon, alert Garrison…”

They were too far underground for an escape, or for any kind of beacon even if there had been one at hand. The minerals in Altean soil wreaked havoc with scanners, much to the irritation of mining ventures, and even in the mountains the chances of a broadcast reaching past the next valley were slim. He thought of Katie and his mom back at Shameseytown, getting the missive about their disappearance, maybe coming out into the mountains to search for him, and shuddered. He didn’t want them anywhere near the killing ground that had been Kerberos.

“When you get back on your feet,” Matt promised bleakly. Without the ambient to give him away, he could lie as much as he wanted. “I’m not going anywhere without you.” 

Shiro sighed. “Mission rules. I’m… protect you.”

“You do,” Matt whispered. “You are.” 

The silence inside his head was killing him. The empty ache in the pit of his stomach gnawed like vermin teeth. The holes in his memory terrified him as he felt around their edges. He hoarded water for Shiro and traded food for Shiro and made sure Shiro was warm at night and checked Shiro’s bandages, his hands moving mechanically, and he was afraid, afraid, afraid.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brig are you literally going to write an intro chapter for each character MAYBE, I DON'T KNOW.


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